There is nothing better than Xfce, if you dont like the desktop, at least Xfce allows you to customize. KDE seems interesting, but the last time i tried it, 10 years ago more or less, it was a bit buggy.
this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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Until my laptop dies or cannot support it, I'm sticking with KDE Plasma. Love how MX configured it (because I'm lazy) and absolutely will keep using it for as long as my laptop survived or can hold it.
Might try other ones in VMs (like ratpoison) in the future for other machines I might set up in the future, but for now KDE Plasma is my go-to that I'll probably be using for a long time.
Xfce, ol' reliable.
Difficult. Paperwm/ Niri has the best workflow.
I am looking forward to set niri as compositor on cosmic.
LXQT or KDE I just like the QT look and feel.
GNOME is great in general but not for me, it is too much MacOS alike and too limited for my liking.
KDE.
The one I'm using right now of course!
I used Ratpoison for well over a decade, and only replaced it with sway once I had a new machine and figured it was time to try Wayland. Apparently that's some 4-5 years ago already.
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I've been using spectrwm for over a decade https://github.com/conformal/spectrwm and have no plans to change
Interesting, do you know i3wm? If so, what is the advantage of spectrwm over it?
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XFCE. It's lightweight, easy to tweak and looks great. I run it on my 6 y.o. potato laptop
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KDE plasma, unless it's on a tablet, then Gnome
I'm in either terminal or browser most of the time, DE is not an issue for me... KDE has an easy battery life optimization feature for laptops, so I guess I'll go KDE
I use XFCE. If their Wayland support isn't ready when openSUSE Tumbleweed eliminates support for x11, I'm not sure what I'll go to.
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KDE Plasma for ease of use if using Nvidia Otherwise Hyprland or exwm
it's probably gonna be plasma6 by a hair over cinnamon on a rolling distribution. as much as people shit on manjaro here and on that other site, it has never broke on me--whether i update constantly or let it go 2-3 months between them.
but if the de and the underlying os are magically compatible, and those and programs kept up to date, never obsolete, and new ones appear for it as needed or desired... then sorry, it won't be linux... i'm going back to something like 95osr2, 98se or w2k.
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MATE has been on most of my machines, except the BSD ones.
But past year or so, I have grown a fondness towards ctwm, and gradually migrated my machines to it, Linux and BSD alike.
It is not a DE, but the fact that I have to assemble my suite of software myself on my machines, makes the point of using DEs moot.
Whatever I can hit the super key and type what program I want. If it can open a browser steam or dark table, the rest doesn't matter much. I was on crunchbang++ then popOS then fedora now I'm on arch with hyprland
Cinnamon for 2 reasons
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KDE is missing a lot of features which still only works in Gnome. Like the taskbar Calendar app syncing events with services like Google Calendar
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cinnamon is extremely stable and doesn’t move your icons around when you connect to an external display with your laptop and the display has a different resolution.
i'm already doing this with gnome lol.
if my computer was older, probably xfce.
I'm a cog in the machine and use KDE, but xfce is awesome, I would use xfce if I couldn't use KDE.
Probably either KDE or NsCDE, I always seem to come back to those
Xfce, and Cinnamon. You can't force me to choose just one.
I thought KDE was the popular choice to be honest. I feel like all the toolp newish OS are using KDE and the top old OS are using Gnome.
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Call me basic, but mint xfce. It’s light, customizable, and so damn stable. That’s all I really want. I love messing with other distros but this one is my baby
I'm using PopOS Cosmic alpha (not based on Gnome) on my new laptop and like it a lot so far. It has a few rough edges, but nothing I'd switch to something else over. (In fact, I did use the Gnome version of Cosmic until my previous laptop broke.)
My current desktop is xmonad + xfce in no-desktop mode. Almost no configuration in xmonad, all the stuff like monitor layout and mouse props is handled by xfce. And yes my laptop that I used it on for 6-7 years is now broken (ish) so I've already unlocked this acheivement.
I do feel slightly guilty about not moving to wayland, but I'm not sure how that would improve my experience at all. I did hear xfce is almost there on wayland, so maybe I can move to sway + xfce on wayland at some point.
I'll stay on XFCE until I die ... or until my Hyprland config is finished. Whichever comes first.
i3
Probably Plasma because it's familiar and you're able to customize it extensively over time.
Flip a coin between cinnamon and plasma
I've been using Mate ever since Gnome-2 transitioned to Gnome-3 and I didn't like the transition. I like a clean screen with simple menus, Plasma is just way too cluttered for me.