• Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
    32·
    4 months ago

    KDE is my favorite, but I’m excited to try Cosmic once it’s a little farther along.

    I also love Cinnamon, not because it looks great, or has a ton of customizablity, but because it is so stable. It’s been the best #JustWorks DE in my experience.

    Those are the only two I use regularly. Xfce is nice once you get it customized, but it’s kind of a pain to get configured. I don’t have much use for sophisticated tiling, so tiling window managers are just curiosities to me. I’ve played with i3, Sway, Hyprland, and a few others over the years.

    I wish I had a use case for them, but alas, all my day to day needs are handled just fine with basic Window snapping, tmux, kitty tabs, and occasionally using a second virtual desktop.

  • flameleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish
    25·
    4 months ago

    I tried lots of DE’s when distros started switching to GNOME 3.

    Now I just run Xfce on everything.

  • megopieEnglish
    22·
    4 months ago

    the first DE I used on Linux was cinnamon and I was like “wow, this is great, everything makes sense to me out of the box”

    And then I tried Gnome and was incredibly put off by it, like “why the hell is this over here, this layout is strange to me. Why are all these unconventional features on by default, this is very annoying.”

    And then I tried KDE and I was like “wow, this is great and everything makes sense to me out of the box, also there’s all these features and options, I don’t know what they do, but i don’t have to interact with them if I don’t want to.”

    • muusemuuse@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      7·
      4 months ago

      KDE and GNOME each have their shortcomings. KDE has never been completely stable for me but it’s so much better than it used to be. GNOME is the best at what it’s good at and the worst at everything else. There’s no grey area with gnome.

      Cosmic looks super promising. I need to play with it.

    • Bluewing@lemmy.world
      2·
      4 months ago

      I just install the Fedora spin of COSMIC. So far, I have to say that I’m impressed by it. It’s pretty lightweight and nimble on low-end hardware while still having just enough customizing to be satisfying. The DE is also pretty easy and simple to use. It also appears to be very stable and tolerant during use.

      If you got time, I would tell you to just try it. It has quickly gone from “I’m not very sure about this choice.” to “Hey, I kinda like this.”

  • TwiddleTwaddle
    19·
    4 months ago

    I quite like KDE Plasma on my steam deck, but on my desktops I always use XFCE

    • LurkingLuddite@piefed.socialEnglish
      13·
      4 months ago

      Ironic given XFCE is supposed to be the light weight one and the steam deck is the portable device.

      I like both of them, though. Plenty of customizations in both, not that I tinker around much any more.

  • Schiffsmädchenjunge@sh.itjust.works
    16·
    4 months ago

    I’ve been using KDE since ver 2.something.
    I like the idea of tiling window managers.
    But I’m old.
    I’m set in my ways.
    I don’t want to get used to new things.

    • muusemuuse@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      4 months ago

      KDE was wild a feral in the early days of plasma. It was heavier than GNOME. It was unstable. It was a nice visual refresh but functionally terrible. It’s really pulled away from that thankfully.

  • ReCursing@feddit.ukEnglish
    16·
    4 months ago

    I’ve yet to see anything that compares to kde, and I just don’t understand why so many distros default to gnome!

  • orlyowl@piefed.caEnglish
    14·
    4 months ago

    I’ve been using Linux for twenty years. I didn’t use KDE until they declared Plasma 5 ready for primetime. (I hated Plasma 4, and didn’t like the look and feel of KDE 3.5 at all)

    Since hopping on with Plasma 5 I have absolutely no interest in anything else. I love KDE Plasma and it just keeps getting better.

    That’s me in OP.

          • Bluewing@lemmy.world
            3·
            4 months ago

            Yeah, that’s fine that’s what you use. I don’t have a pig in this fight. But I’m using Wayland because that’s what Fedora has adopted for a good while now. I do have to say, it’s been a seamless transition. Everything just works. My dual monitor setup, running Kinonite, has never been so easy and trouble free as it is with Wayland. The single monitor box I have with a low power mini desktop with 8Gbit of shared memory, runs Wayland without a hitch.

            The thing is, everything has its time under the sun. Whether its X11 or you and me. The guy that has been maintaining X11 doesn’t want to do it anymore. And it appears no one else wants to do it either. So X11 will fade away and Wayland will have it’s time now. And someday Wayland will also be replaced. And people will mourn it’s passing just like X11.

    • vodka@feddit.org
      6·
      4 months ago

      I miss being on XFCE, I’ll be so quick to go back when their wayland transition is done

    • baltakatei@sopuli.xyz
      2·
      4 months ago

      I tried Cosmic for a week. It looked nice but I returned to LXQt because I want:

      • To display time in ISO 8601 without also messing with locales
      • To customize my file manager columns
      • To use Emacs in a terminal emulator
      • To not have my windows scattered to the four winds every time I lock my screen because the fancy window tiling feature is half-baked
      • To have the X window manager back. I’m sure some people with use cases besides mine that are compatible only with Wayland, but I simply don’t see the need nor do I wish to be a guinea pig submitting bug reports when so many guinea pigs before me had years of their lives sacrificed polishing X.

      Also, the performance of programs like the default Cosmic file manager was much slower then comparable alternatives like pcmanfm-qt which I know run fast even on 2005 Compaq laptop hardware.

  • smeg@infosec.pubEnglish
    14·
    4 months ago

    I just want a conventional desktop paradigm that feels relatively integrated. For almost a decade I used Cinnamon until I found myself really wanting Wayland. For the past 5 years or so, I have used GNOME. It’s clean, and with a few tweaks it meets my needs.

    • reksas@sopuli.xyz
      3·
      4 months ago

      to me, gnome seems to be just bad ui design for people with stockholm syndrome about it.

  • ian@feddit.ukEnglish
    10·
    4 months ago

    Plasma is great. But it’s missing an important feature. Apps, such as backup or sync, cannot navigate to network shares, to use as a backup target. Dolphin sees the shares ok, but its important to backup. Windows lets apps select network targets. Plasma should too.

    • pelya@lemmy.world
      6·
      4 months ago

      Dolphin shows you places that are not in your file system, such as network shares or your phone‘s media directory. Those are fake files, illusions of Satan, temptations designed to stray you from the path of God. Avoid anything that is not opened with open and not read with read system calls, for doing so is a sin before eyes of God (fopen and fread are permitted). Mount your network shares using sudo mount -t cifs.

      • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        4 months ago

        hear me out. what do you do when the network share server is not always available? like because your system is a laptop, or because you are doing maintenance on your server and its off.

        what I do is suffer the consequences of many software that does not handle it well, and freeze for a minute (or worse) when it tries to open the mounted share even when it shouldn’t even try. multiple KDE apps are guilty of that, including dolphin and kate, but to some extent almost everything else too.
        but that is not ideal.

      • ian@feddit.ukEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        It’s a shame Dolphin gets it wrong. I hope that bug has been reported. And I’d love to find a way for non IT users to mount the share as a workaround to the missing functionality. But that’s missing too.

        • pelya@lemmy.world
          1·
          4 months ago

          Dolphin does mount it …somewhere. Supposedly. I expect only KDE developers know where exactly. You can get the same functionality using Gnome file manager and gio command, and you get your network share properly mounted in a file system, but then you won’t be using KDE.

          • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            4 months ago

            dolphin manages your connection with kio, but only those things can use the share that are aware of kio. so qt apps mostly.

    • Johanno@feddit.org
      3·
      4 months ago

      I use Nixos, but my ssh mount and nfs and samba mount can be selected as backup path for kup.

      • ian@feddit.ukEnglish
        2·
        4 months ago

        Nice. Kup actually lets me see the Network. But then complains if I select a samba share. There is a popular bug report about this. I prefer sync backup to access documents directly, instead of kups scrambled backup files.

        • Johanno@feddit.org
          1·
          4 months ago

          What do you use for backup?

          Kup currently also does not satisfy my needs, but I am not sure what else I should use.