Generally Plasma. I really like the look of Libadwaita applications, but the GNOME desktop is very much a "do it our way, or take a hike" - and some of the interactions that I've seen in the past between the GNOME group and others... well, lets just say whenever I see drama in the Linux community as of recently its always been either with GNOME or Wayland. That doesn't necessarily instill a lot of confidence in me using either of those.
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What’s with all the drama regarding Wayland? I’m seeing it constantly.
Some Wayland fans like to ignore reality, like the fact 80% of Linux users use Nvidia, or that Nvidia offers a free Linux driver for their own reasons and have zero incentive to open source it, or that even if it weren't for Nvidia we still can't use Wayland because it's not ready and doesn't do everything that X does.
When you ignore reality you tend to get into arguments constantly.
As far as I understand, its the major push for moving forward with Wayland and dropping X11 as fast as possible yet Wayland still doesn't work for a lot of workflows (say, making use of global hotkeys, or Nvidia users, etc).
I started with Zorin, then GNOME via Pop!OS, then KDE, vanilla GNOME, then KDE again.
Who knows cos they all have good features.
I have used xfce and cinnamon without any problems, I think I like xfce a little more.
I'm new to this but KDE basically has all of the aesthetics customization features and quality of life features I always wanted out of Windows + Rainmeter. Finally I can have my videos pinned on the top easily every time. Finally I can have my fancy widgets. I can have universal color themes and fonts beyond what Windows ever offered. So there is more abstract stuff out there, but for now I'm living the long lost dream.
GNOME 2. I tried 3 for a year or two and the task bar crashes or lack the very basic feature of swapping window position. It's an external plugin so I don't expect it to be fixed in any year soon. Then I realize GNOME 2 was perfect before they ruined it in 3 so now I've been on MATE desktop for 4 years now. I think the new team is too small to catch up on any modern changes (webp support is lacking, and no wayland) and nothing I could do can fix that (minor development work on build system, donation) but I'd still accept a perfect 2010 era desktop over 2023 desktop that doesn't feel right after a decade of development.
My favs:
- (probably) Cosmic
- GNOME
- Plasma
Cinnamon at the moment because I'm running LMDE 6. After that it would be gnome however it does have a higher RAM usage. I find Gnome based DE's easier to read and understand.
Whereas KDE just confuses me with its illegible font, awful icons (especially in Libre Office) and the nonsensical horizontal blue lines in some settings.
Blorp
Gnome, but only with dash-to-panel. Otherwise XFCE.
Gnome, sometimes XFCE on older hardware.
Cinnamon. Really simple, nothing fancy, just right-to-the-point DE which doesn't look dated like XFCE and LXDE do.