What's your favorite Desktop Environment?

[TechnoJunky]

Vote and tell us why you like DE X (because I've never used anything else is acceptable). If you select other, please reply to the thread with which other you prefer.

I saw some old threads on this, but no poll. I thought it would be cool to see some numbers. I wanted to add a couple other DEs but the site only allows 10 items and I needed an Other option for any that I didn't capture.

 

[TechnoJunky]

KDE is mine. I've used Enlightenment several times but I keep coming back to KDE. It's user friendly and allows me to customize pretty much all aspects of the desktop.

 

[Deleted member 58530]

Hello Technojunky,


Gnome 3, Cinnamon, Xfce, LXDE, (jwm, rox-icewm).

jwm, rox-icewm are window managers and the default user interface for Antix Linux and Puppy Linux.

Perhaps appear to be rudimentary to some they are full featured and very configurable.

 

[rado84]

Cinnamon 3.8 and below. 4.0 sucks.
Apps for other DEs run very stably on Cinnamon. And Cinnamon has the best customization properties out there.

 

[wizardfromoz]

I use 8 of the DEs in my stable of Linux, but MATE is probably a fave.

MATE is pronounced "mar-tay" after a South American coffee-like beverage.

Each DE has its merits, IMO.

Wiz

 

[TechnoJunky]

Each DE has its merits, IMO.

Wiz

While I don't use many and some I may not like, I don't disagree with you Wiz. I'd say if they didn't have their merits, they'd vanish. Yesterday I installed Mate and Cinnamon on a Ubuntu VM I had. I've never used them before but they both seem very similar. Why do you like Mate over Cinnamon?

 

[Vrai]

I have tried and used most of them.
I like KDE very much but I find myself getting 'lost in the weeds' (too much tweaking)!
Mate, which as I understand it is basically Gnome 2, is not bad.
LXQT was quite usable.
I absolutely loathe Unity and that is one reason I switched from Ubuntu to something else.
I first tried Gnome 3 when it was only available on Fedora. It was very early in the development but I thought it was a gorgeous desktop. Unfortunately it was much too limited and subsequent versions are wholly unusable. The Gnome 3 devs attitude that they know what is best for the user and so strip away the ability to tweak it is unacceptable to me. Also, the last time I tried Gnome 3 the only way to extend features and usability was through third party extensions. Nope, not gonna do it
So, I've been using Cinnamon on Linux Mint for several years and find it quite usable. Prior to that Gnome 2 was my favorite.
XFCE is good and seems to be gaining quite a lot in popularity.

 

[Deleted member 58530]

The advantage or preference of Mate or Xfce is simplicity and low resource demands.

Then some users just prefer the plain old fashion design of Mate and Xfce and both of these desktops are full feature and very configurable.

KDE and Cinnamon are cool desktops for those who want the eye candy.

KDE and Cinnamon offer don't offer anything that can't be done using Mate or Xfce desktops.

My 0.02 cents.

 

[rado84]

MATE is pronounced "mar-tay" after a South American coffee-like beverage.

I thought it was supposed to be "MATTE" but was written with a typo on purpose.

 

[TechnoJunky]

I've been pronouncing it as it's spelled (in English) until the other day I watched a video and the guy kept "mispronouncing' it as matte (like a latte) . So I decided to look it up and went to the wiki and they said he was pronouncing it right. As it turns out, the DE was developed in South America, where Spanish is the predominate language. So in Spanish it's pronounced ma-tay.

 

[wizardfromoz]

So in Spanish it's pronounced ma-tay.

That is as I was saying, our accents differ.

The author of it was from Venezuela or Columbia, or somewhere. He worked with the GNOME project and got disenchanted with the way it was headed so started MATE.

Yerba Mate is drunk traditionally using a silver straw, and there are pictures of the Pope drinking it.

Why do you like Mate over Cinnamon?

Cinnamon I find a close 2nd. MATE's mate-terminal is more customisable than GNOME's gnome-terminal, which is in Cinnamon as well as GNOME.

Cinnamon has built-in the opportunity to run your wallpapers as a slide show, so we have our kids and grandkids on my wife's Linux Mint Cinnamon.

Xfce also has the slideshow option, as well as xfce4-terminal being nearly as customisable as MATE's.

For multibooters, Xfce has an annoying habit that when you leave a session of GParted, it will remount all your partitions, either showing a nag popup with each, or a full window of each remounted partition displayed under its File Manager, Thunar.

I am with @Vrai on Unity. Again, from a multibooting perspective - all my partitions lined up on the launcher at left make it compacted to the extreme, and difficult to use.

Unity, and GNOME, use the Nautilus (aka Files) FM, which I find a PITA unless you load addons (and there are plenty out there).

So when we talk DEs, we have -

• the DE itself, with or without some individual apps and utilities that ship with it, the Look and Feel, &c
• FM
• WM - Window Manager

all intimately tied together. You can change an FM, but then you have a hybrid.

Also if you change an FM, do not delete the default FM (only its icon) or you will brick the DE.

Well, I've spent more than Tom, $2 I reckon.

Nice Thread, though, Carl

Cheers

Wiz

 

[rado84]

So in Spanish it's pronounced ma-tay.

I don't speak Spanish, so i'll keep pronouncing it "matte". As in matte color - gloss, matte, metallic, pearlscent: terms well known from PC games with cars, such as NFS.