After trying out Cosmic, Gnome,KDE Plasma, and Hyprland, I feel like plasma is the most usable for me coming from Windows. It solves the gripes I had about lack of customizability while still starting me off with a familiar homebar. I will be going back and forth with gnome for a while.
I really like gnome and the sliding desktops, and all the extensions seem to make it very customizable as well, but not directly like plasma, instead you mix and match (or make) extensions to get the look you want. (correct me if im wrong, I used it for a day)
Hyprland seems very nice for multitasking but the keyboard focus of the presets ive tried doesn’t really appeal to me, I like being able to just use my mouse sometimes.
Cosmic, is definitely an alpha and im interested to see what it becomes, wont be using it now.
Debian and xfce, generally. I’m happy to wait for features when they arrive, and xfce works fine.
However, Debian with gnome on my surface pro 6. Xorg just doesn’t handle rotation and touchscreen things very well.
On the other hand, several apps still behave very poorly under Wayland, so it’s a bit of a catch 22 at the moment.
I use emptty and herbsluft.
Not often I meet another herbsluft user in the wild! waves
dwm is neat
I yearn for the day Debian gets proper DWL support
didn’t realize debian does not have dwm support. been thinking about putting it on my deb based laptop bc it feels so nice on my desktop. what do you run?
Sway right now, setup was super straightforward. I just wish it had some dynamic tiling functionality. Plus I really like the suckless mentality of starting with basic functionality and patching in features as needed.
Same. Check out breadonpenguins on the yew tube, some real cool tweaks on their GitHub. their vids inspired me to use dwm.
Love breadonpenguins, she def inspired me too, I’m talking about DWL tho, like the Wayland fork of DWM. I had some issues w the dependencies they had listed.
I still do not understand Wayland. It’s an alternative to X?
It’s to be the replacement for Xorg/X11.
I’ve jumped over the years, Gnome, Cinnamon, KDE, XFCE, Unity, AwesomeWM, QTile, XMonad, Hyprland.
For the last couple of years I’ve completely settled on KDE for my Desktop, and Gnome on my Laptops.
I love the customisability of KDE and being able to turn it into whatever the hell I want lol. But Gnomes gestures on a laptop are unmatched in the Linux space imo, and finally at a point that I firmly believe Gnome gestures are now on par with MacOS gestures.
For the touchpad? I basically use my laptop like a desktop with a mouse, pluggedin to power. (it was more for easy transportation from college to back home, didn’t have a desktop and gaming laptops get insane deals if you keep track, got mine $2,000 off at like $1100 and it was the best all amd alienware config at the time (still handles everything), just preemptively explaining because im used to redditors giving me shit for using a laptop as a desktop)
Lol dw, you won’t get shot here for using your hardware how you intend to use it… Why would anyone get mad about that??
Well if you don’t use your trackpad then obviously Gnome gestures won’t be a big point for you. I never really used to either back when I used tiling Window managers, I solely relied on a purely keyboard driven workflow, until I got a new job and they use MacBook Pros as our work laptops, there I got super into the trackpad gestures. For example, three finger swipe left or right to change workspace, three finger swipe up for an application/workspace overview.
Keep in mind that cosmic is still in an alpha build. It’s missing a lot of features and his buggy here are there. I’m sure it will be pretty awesome and once it releases it 1.0 version.
i was impressed with cosmic when i gave it a spin here… it has a lot of potential… just still very ‘incomplete’ currently.
My preference is the opposite of yours. I just recently set up Hyprland and I love it for the focus on keyboard and the ease of customizing the keybinds.
The other thing I love is the tiling. I almost always have two windows side by side and in every other DE I’ve used (haven’t used cosmic), I always had to faff about to get my windows half and half or into the quarters. So pair that with the keyboard focus and hyprland is the winner for me.
yeah i don’t know what the use case is for hiding or partially hiding windows as if they’re papers on a desk other than sheer skeuomorphism.
I can have multiple windows open at large size, arrange them to overlap so I can peek at the important part and click to bring one to the front. Like in a file browser, I can have multiple directories in multiple windows and switch back and forth without losing sight of the other one entirely.
I tried working with tiling and while it felt kinda cool, in the end it didn’t solve any problem I have. At most I’m working in 2 different windows 99% of the time and I have a second monitor for that. So it’s not that hiding windows is a use case, it’s that tiling them isn’t one.
Hyprland is kinda cool since you can still have windows over windows if you need/want it, I was worried since the width can be off and its easy to just open a window and scale iy manually to see text properly, it doesnt solve any problem I have tho, just forces me to use the keyboard more than I want to.
I definitely want to spend a sunday just customizing and tinkering with it tho, sounds fun.Rnow plasma works super well for me, love that you can right click windows and have them always stay on top or always be below, useful when using the transparent terminal. Hyprland has a top popdown terminal (at least the config I used) which is kinda sick, but not really necessary lol.
Agree. It’s a windowing behaviour I’ve hated forever. Before jumping to linux I used macOS for a long time and the only thing that made it tolerable was a toolbar app that let me create custom keybindings for splitting windows. When inwent Linux I went gnome initially as it gave pretty close to the same functionality built in with super+arrow keys, but there is some stuff about GNOME that just does not work for me. So for me, Hyprland is great
I often dont use my keyboard when casually browsing, reaching for it constantly is annoying in those cases, I’m assuming yall that use linux more are more used to the opposite and not using a graphical interface.
plasmas had no issues going half and half or quarters, better than windows at least, but yeah my monitors are relatively small compared to what other ppl have, so i never want to divide by more than 4
I started using Windows as a young lad, but when I tried using Linux I easily transitioned to KDE. Then I tried Gnome and loved it, used it for a few years before moving over to Hyprland a couple of months ago and I can confidently say that I won’t be going back.
EDIT:
Forgot to mention that the main reason I love Hyprland is because of the crazy level of customization. I use it primarily on my laptop and can navigate easily with keyboard shortcuts, clicking, and even trackpad gestures.Don’t let somebody else’s idea of how to use a DE limit you, just configure whatever you want!
I do like hyprland, I think itll take some time to get a config right but it feels fun to use and thats why I swapped to linux, windows felt boring with its ui and on top of that had constant random so it wasnt the good type of boring. Most shocking part has been having 100s of tabs open and swapping without issue, on windows it did not matter which browser I used my computer would tweak.
Looks like we went the same way through the Linux world. Hyprland is both, it could be good looking like KDE and Gnome and it is keybind tiling like sway and i3.
I never realised before how much useless time we spend for mouse movings and clicks.
Wow trackpad gestures? I’m on gnome and their gestures are really good, if hyperland’s is just as good I might try it out.
Actually I like Cinnamom the best. For VMs without video accelertion, XFCE. For media center and my laptop I stayed with Ubuntu/Gnome.
Work flow. Any desktop will do, that is more about Apps. For me Firefox, LibreOffice esp Calc, Python, Bash, Thunderbird, ssh, Zim, Geany are what I use most.
I love plasma. I used to be into cinnamon, but since the steamdeck, I’ve changed my preference.
Now, I have fedoranplasma spin on my thinkpad.
I really like the windows style DE.
I really like the gnome workflow plus a couple of extensions. Notably I ran across a tiling extension called “grid” that scratched my tiling window needs on my desktop, and gnome is amazing on my laptop trackpad. I zing through desktops quick! Anything it can’t do out of the box, you can find an extension for.
I like the feel of something different than windows.
Bluefin and GNOME.
I do want to use KDE plasma but everytime I use KDE my ADHD starts kicking in and I make the most cursed UI ever then my notification panel stops working
All I to is use Firefox and at night use krita
I have been liking river lately after switching to it from hyprland. River is much more similar to my previous one which was xmonad.
I keep forgetting tiling managers arent des
