this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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So a few months back I asked about you guys os in c/asklemmy, so this time I wanna ask about your desktops you use on this same account.
(I use kde but plan to move to cinnamon I find kde buggy and gnome tracker3 randomly broke for no reason + themeing so yh idk if these happened to anybody)

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[–] 2kool4idkwhat@lemdro.id 3 points 1 hour ago

Gnome. I actually started with KDE. It's a good DE, but it's got so many options that I had choice fatigue. I constantly tweaked my taskbar instead of focusing on what I wanted to do. And it was easy to get it to a "looks broken" state

When I tried Gnome, I fell in love with it. I love the unique workflow, lack of distractions, the modern adwaita design, etc. Everything felt so polished

That being said, I don't like how Gnome devs seemingly can't agree on anything with other desktop environments. And I don't like how they refuse to support server-side window decorations. Like, I agree that CSD are better than SSD, but it would be reasonable to support SSD for toolkits that haven't/don't want to implement CSD themselves, right? Well, Gnome devs in their infinite wisdom disagree

I'm excited for Cosmic. It looks like it combines the best of Gnome and KDE, and the devs don't have the “my way or the highway” mindset

[–] gunpachi@lemmings.world 1 points 45 minutes ago (1 children)

My desktop environment of choice would be XFCE. It's simply easy to configure while not giving me choice fatigue like KDE does. Also I don't like Qt for some reason.

GNOME is great but I find their extensions to be super clunky sometimes. Some of them even break in between updates. The main selling point of gnome (for me) is the minimal look and feel, extensions kind of ruin that a little bit.

Don't get me wrong plasma and Gnome are wonderful DEs but XFCE provides a simple and balanced desktop IMO. The only thing that's missing is full Wayland support.

P.S : Anyways most of the time I would be running a window manager instead of a DE, my current favourite Wayland window-manager is Labwc because it gives me openbox vibes.

[–] Mwa@thelemmy.club 1 points 25 minutes ago

Am the opposite of you, I don't like gtk.

[–] Mio@feddit.nu 1 points 49 minutes ago (1 children)

Kde because i want customization and standard is also ok. I tried gnome but did not like that extensions were required for tray icons etc. Gnome is otherwise good.

I3 and hyperland i dont get. Some windows should not be very large no matter how much free screen space you have. Example is calculator or old school chat applications like pidgin. No native standard set of applications. Everything must manually be added and custom, like everything in kde settings(sound output, network settings, screen size etc). Waiting for when applications can recommend its screen size to the window manager.

[–] CHKMRK@programming.dev 1 points 7 minutes ago

You can set specific applications as floating windows in i3 so that they take their original size

[–] dino@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

KDE at home "gaming" desktop, but would love to move away from it, for various bugs and non-working configurations. At work and home laptop I am using WMs, riverwm / i3.

[–] Mwa@thelemmy.club 1 points 54 minutes ago

Same, I wanna move to another desktop.

[–] steeznson@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

Typically I don’t use a DE. I’ll go for dmenu + dwm usually if I only want a WM. I find the default bindings and behaviour for the tiling is the most ergonomic when comparing it to other WMs like i3.

When I do have to get a DE setup then I’ll use XFCE because I like how it stays out of the way and I find it easy to customise.

[–] secret300@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 hour ago

I love gnome and use that for everything except gaming. If I want to game I use KDE

[–] DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 2 hours ago

GNOME, because I started with Red Hat 6 and I'm used to it, on Fedora Silverblue, because I have a long history of fucking up my PC and that makes it harder. For remote machines XFCE because the mouse is cute.

[–] skybarnes@discuss.online 6 points 4 hours ago

KDE all the way, it's incredible especially since 6

[–] JTskulk@lemmy.world 9 points 5 hours ago

I love KDE. It's got easy to use power user features and is very robust.

[–] _lunar@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

trinity because it's lighter than almost everything else while having more features than almost everything else

[–] theshatterstone54@feddit.uk 1 points 1 hour ago

Last update 27th Oct 2024? Trinity is still kicking around? I have so many questions...

Will there be Wayland support?

What is the purpose of it?

Does it even use later versions of Qt?

How lightweight is it (how much RAM and CPU does it use on a cold boot?)?

[–] dirtbiker509@lemm.ee 7 points 6 hours ago

KDE Plasma. It came on my steam deck which was my first intro to it, it blew me away and installed it on my laptop and finally ditched Windows shortly after. Works great for me.

[–] ElectronBadger@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 hours ago

i3. Superb for keyboard-driven environment. Ultra fast, so responsive and configurable. The best.

[–] wer2@lemm.ee 6 points 7 hours ago

XFCE. I also like tiling WMs, but I often have to share computers and they are too unintuitive for the rest of the family.

[–] Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml 3 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

KDE on my main gaming PC, or if I want something that looks really modern and sleek without tons of setup/tweaking on another PC.

Mint with Cinnamon if I want a #justworks setup that is rock stable and I don't need to look sexy.

My side business laptop uses LMDE with Cinnamon for that reason. I need that thing to be rock stable and dependable at all times.

Cinnamon has been more stable for me than any other DE, and in my experience, is just as performant as other low-spec favorites like XFCE. My fresh install of LMDE with Cinnamon right after boot uses about 850MB of memory. My testing with XFCE was about the same, maybe 50-75MB less, which for my use case is effectively identical.

Not crapping on XFCE though, I like playing with it on one of my old thinkpads. Not a fan at all of Gnome, I've tried to like it for years, but I just don't care for it, and I experience quite a few bugs.

I plan on trying the new Cosmic DE soon, it seems like Gnome done better, and I could see myself liking it from the reviews I've watched.

[–] simonced@lemmy.one 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Also Cinnamon main here, love the lightness of it.

[–] Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 hours ago

It's really solid.

[–] UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 4 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (6 children)

Windows 10

Because I am soft and weak from getting smashed every day at my 3 part time jobs and I just want to drink and play video games at the end of the day, not learn a new OS.

I promise to try Linux Mint when windows 10 is no longer supported.

[–] theshatterstone54@feddit.uk 1 points 1 hour ago

I'd suggest switching to open source apps or apps that work on Linux, maybe check up on the compatibility of games you play over at ProtonDB.

That will make your transition smoother.

[–] Mwa@thelemmy.club 1 points 3 hours ago
[–] yrmp@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

I switched to PopOS from Windows 11 in three hours. I had been backing everything up for weeks though. Generally everything I did on Windows works out of the box on PopOS.

Aside from my bluetooth speaker not connecting automatically and needing to run a Windows VM for Corsair peripheral LEDs, I’ve not had to do a ton of customization.

It’s been well worth it. Really enjoying it so far and highly recommend.

[–] Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 hours ago

My advice: Don't wait until you have to switch to start learning, it will frustrate you if you're under pressure to figure it out all at once.

Buy a cheapo SSD online, 500GB ones are out there for $35 and install Mint on it.

Use that to dual boot and play around with Linux. Start slow, if you get frustrated, take a break. It will be a much smoother experience than you probably expect these days.

Mint is very easy to get started with, very Windows-like in its UI. And it has easy options to install Nvidia drivers if you need to, and the app store is very easy to use.

[–] communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

People who are brand new to linux should start with immutable kde based distros, you'll have a much better time with fedora kinoite.

I'm down to help support infinitely, my matrix is available on my profile, feel free to message with any troubleshooting needs.

[–] nanook@friendica.eskimo.com 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

@communist @UltraGiGaGigantic I disagree, I started with Redhat and moved to Ubuntu, MUCH prefer the latter.

[–] DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 2 hours ago

I started with Red Hat, moved to Ubuntu, now back to Fedora Atomic and very happy with it.

[–] Acters@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

Yeah Linux still has plenty to work on. It's unfortunate how limited the support is. If game and app developers could target Linux, then the cost to support and maintain would be lower than they have to do with Windows. Unfortunately, market share and power of defaults work against us.

If you can, look towards getting a steam deck. At least that is a Linux thing that is pretty decent and portable.

[–] yrmp@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

I game on both the deck and a desktop with pop!_os. I can say gaming on my desktop is just as good if not better than the deck for because it can leverage my desktop hardware and it’s way easier to go under the hood with proper peripherals. Linux has come a long way with gaming. Most of the shit that doesn’t run on linux are games that cost too much for too little content or they’re just gonna be battle pass/cosmetic farms that cater to whales and aren’t actually fun in any sense of the word.

If you’re gonna be a top 0.0001% competitive gamer, you’ll probably wanna stick to windows. If you don’t play FPSes competively, a linux based gaming PC is probably fine. Me? I’m a middle aged dude with kids who racks up about 20 hours a week somehow, and linux more than suits my needs.

I’ve had more success with Lutris and Wine in getting certain abandonware games (Black and White for example) to run than I ever did on Windows.

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 1 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

What broke with tracker3 ?

[–] Mwa@thelemmy.club 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Idk,it would not run anymore.

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Easy to force a tracker reset, or enable disable. Or even reinstall. Seems easier than findinf a new DE no?

Also tracker ahould not be using up so much diskIO or CPU like people mention, if it is it is tripping up on a files internal data, and status/logs will show which file(s)

[–] Mwa@thelemmy.club 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Oh, I couldn't figure out how to reset or reinstall it so I just went back to kde.(also themeing which I didn't mention)

[–] nanook@friendica.eskimo.com 1 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

@BCsven @Mwa I disabled tracker and use plocate from a shell to find stuff. The reason, tracker's crawl of the disk space is extremely inefficient, but plocate keeps track of things like directory update times so does not recrawl a directory if the time stamps have not changed, thus saving a lot of disk I/O.

[–] Mwa@thelemmy.club 1 points 2 hours ago
[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 hours ago

Tracker should not be recrawling everything, unless you delete the index with a tracker3 reset

Once it builds the initial index only new files or changed files should be recrawled for meta data.

The only time I have seen Tracker use cpu was when it got hung up on a file that had special code in it that was messing with parsing the data and so it would fail and retry over and over.

[–] icogniito@lemmy.zip 6 points 10 hours ago

I dont use a DE, I use a WM.

Semantics aside I’m on Hyprland, been using it for 6 months now and absolutely love it

[–] frankwilco@lemm.ee 3 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

XFCE.

I recently switched to it after a year or so with KDE. Deff see some improvement in terms of battery life with my laptop, but I'm still not used to the lack of WinKey+Num shortcuts (I'm aware of docklike, but I need labels for open windows).

[–] Mwa@thelemmy.club 1 points 3 hours ago

Winkey on linux is called superkey you can configure it to do what you want in settings.

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