I’m currently testing Fedora KDE on a VM (windows host) before eventually switching over to Linux completely.
Xmonad!!! (And in 25 years, Waymonad!)
Gnome
I love gnome but too used to kde to switch.
Gnome. Feels most polished and least cluttered to me.
I agree. I use gnome on nix and it has been great, especially on a touchpad.
KDE if you want a customizable DE, Gnome if you like simplicity and XFCE if you are on less than 4GB. Anything else is mental illness mixed with boomer nostalgia.
Gnome 44. Simple, familiar and all my extensions work!
GNOME
I really like plain “boring” vanilla Gnome. It’s straightforward, I like it’s workflow, it does everything I need it too, and looks nice too. I’m not a fan of “power user” UIs as I feel like they have too many features I’ll never use filling them up. You can always get more programs to do more things anyway. Like I use compilers and disassemblers all the time, but I’m not upset that Gnome doesn’t ship with those features built in when I’m in some weird 1% of users that need them. On the other hand, I think KDE is important to the ecosystem too, and I donate $100 a year to both the Gnome and KDE projects.
xfce. For me, it strikes that perfect balance between lightweight and featureful, looks good but not too fancy, is customizable and usable. I set it up the way I like it and it never changes on me.
Plasma definitely. Xfce is second.
Any preferences on the distro? I’ve been enjoying Fedora but I’ve also tested Ubuntu and enjoyed that
Fedora Plasma is truly awesome!
You should try Arch btw
KDE, I enjoy the whole ecosystem both visually and functionally.
KDE and Cinnamon.
I prefer Plasma, but having an nvidia GPU makes using wayland a non-starter.
XFCE is my second favorite.
AwesomeWM is my current daily driver but outside the scope of the question
Hyprland
Honestly, this is the first I’ve heard of Hyprland, but it looks sick.
I recently switched back to GNOME after a few years on KDE, mostly because of Wayland support. I honestly don’t care much about the DE, provided it gets out of my way. I used to use a Tiling WM, so I may give a Wayland tiling WM a shot.
Hmm I am using Wayland on KDE for 6-12months with no problem, why did you need to swap to Gnome to get it working ?
Just curious, no tribal warfare intended (the gnome vs kde fight is a bit silly to me)
IDK, Wayland was super unstable for me on KDE, even on my AMD GPU (RX 6650XT). It wouldn’t launch at all through SDDM (black screen, and I checked other TTYs), and it would lock up quickly (maybe a kernel panic?, I couldn’t even switch TTYs) when I launched through the command line. I used NVIDIA before that, and couldn’t get KDE to launch at all on Wayland (GNOME did, but was buggy), so I used KDE on X until I replaced my GPU.
I honestly didn’t look much into it, but launching GNOME through GDM worked perfectly, so I didn’t feel the need to debug further.
My goal was to use Wayland, and I didn’t particularly care which DE did it. I have a slight preference for KDE, but I honestly don’t use enough DE features to care too much, I just want something to launch apps and then go away. As long as it has a decent terminal with tmux, can switch windows, and has a clock with a calendar, that’s enough for me.
