Bottom left is Awesome WM. Ask me anything or tell us your picks!
(and feel free to tear me apart on my picks)
I like hyprland, even tho the devs are assholes
I’m open to switching to similar tiling WMs but I’ve put a lot of time into my current config
Here we go, because why not:
Favorite: LXQt+i3. LXQt plays nice with tiling WMs, GTK and Qt, and it’s just way easier than installing a WM on its own. Tiling WMs are GOAT.
Honorable Mention: Crunchbang/early Bunsenlabs and Cinnamon Least Favorite: Gnome
First: probably Openbox on Crunchbang
Current: LXQt+i3
Longest Used: LXQt+i3
Future: sway, possibly with LXQt if I make the switch after the LXQt devs finish providing Wayland support.
First: Gnome Favorite: Gnome Longest Used: Gnome Least Favorite: KDE Current: Gnome Future: Gnome
Used Cinnamon, KDE, XFCE in the past. Bucking the trend, I think Gnome is fine and does what I need it to do. You do you, though. That’s what is great about Linux.
Gnome + Wayland + NVIDIA drivers = Not a good time.
Gnome was fine, gnome today is unusable.
What sort of issues do you run into with GNOME w/ Nvidia? I’m curious because it has been rock solid for me with 5070ti on a laptop.
The most maddening behavior with alt tab. Let’s say I have 4 windows open on a single desktop split on a single monitor. [A|B] and [C|D]. C and D become best buddies, if I alt tab from A to D to reference something, A loses focus and I get both C and D visible. It becomes impossible to look at A and D together. Had no issues with sway/Wayland/nvidia. Nor with xfce but trying to let x be dead. Don’t have the issue with gnome/Wayland on Intel chips.
That does sound frustrating tbh. Do you think something similar to macOS’s stage manager to help your use-case? I built an extension to enable Window previews in the dock and I’m wondering if it might be useful to add that as a feature.
I’m an AMD fan so I haven’t ran into that issue. I could see how that is a problem though.
Non deterministic alt tabbing with arbitrary “buddy windows” is the most frustrating desktop experience imaginable. It’s less bad without nvidia in the mix but still seen it happen with Intel chips as well. Moved back to sway for tiling goodness and my sanity is restored.
First DE used was definitely Cinnamon. Longest use should be awesome or i3, mah be close. Least favourite definitely awesome though, due to the way you have to configure it. It’s just such a mess. My favourite is also my current: herbstluftwm. Configuring it is actually fun (Btw, I am not into ricing, I am rather implementing unnecessary things). And I am still waiting for a wm which would actually convince me to use on wayland. That one would be the future wm^^
Longest-used: XFCE, by far. Current: Wayfire + Noctalia 5.
I’m still an user of XFCE4. It just works.
Edit: Wrong DE name.
huh. I’ve never heard of that one.
Oh, sorry, it’s XFCE4. I wrote it on my phone and gthe finger pressed the wrong letter.
i3/sway for life
Favorite: Cinnamon.
Honorable Mention: KDE.
Least Favorite: Gnome.
First: Gnome.
Current: Cinnamon.
Longest Used: KDE.
Future: CinnamonFavorite DE: Niri First DE used: XFCE DE you want to use in the future: Niri Honorable Mention: Hyprland least favorite: Anything non tiling, or maybe Hyprland due to a lot of minor annoyances Current DE: Niri longest used DE: i3 Current Distro: NixOS and Arch
You should try Niri!
Fellow nix os enjoyer ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
niri and dank material shell 🙏👌
I’ve considered it, but i’m not sure if I like the scrolling tiling yet…
At first its novelty, then it starts to make sense, and then you can’t live without it. I’ve tried to switch to other DE’s a couple of times including similar ones like MangoWC and I always come back. I used Cosmic for 30 mins before I ragequit and went back to Niri.
I tried Niri for a little more than a month and it is great I feel that regular tiling is better. Sure, the scrolling layout has the benefit of not having to resize windows as often, but at the cost of having to look/search for those windows that overflow the workspace view. Also Niri has a problem that when you toggle fullscreen on a window inside a column it will expel it out from the column. And I’m not a fan of the dynamic workspaces amongst some other little quirks too. I have a blog post about it if you are interested.
Nonetheless it is a great window manager and it is in my top 3.
Niri’s workspaces are just rows, windows being expelled from the columns when fullscreened is very much expected.
I suppose what you want is floating the window and making it fullscreen, returning it to it’s position in the layout after returning it to it’s normal size?
To be honest, sounds like a bit of pain to implement.
I suppose what you want is floating the window and making it fullscreen, returning it to it’s position in the layout after returning it to it’s normal size?
I want to fullscreen a window that is contained within a column and when I toggle out of the fullscreen the window must not be expelled out of the column(staying in place). For example in Hyprland’s scrolling layout windows that are fullscreen keep are kept in the column (it looks clunky as hell).
To be honest, sounds like a bit of pain to implement.
I talked to Niri’s developer long time ago on Matrix and he agreed on that, however this behaviour (or apparent behaviour) is not the same with tabbed windows withing a column. I understand that within the windowing logic it is hard thing to do, and that they are not the same operations.
For what is worth, I’m not the only one with this problem, many people have expressed the same thought.
Well, it’s because the whole column is fullscreened instead of a single window in that case. I guess you can abuse it a little bit and write a script that’d switch the column into tabbed mode before fullscreening a window if the column has more than one window in it.
I don’t think there is a way to know if the column is already tabbed, though. Might need a bit of unholy incantations to make it all work.
Oh yeah, that would be pretty cursed.
Niri is crazy good. I get itchy without it now
Niri + dank material shell over here. I absolutely love the infinite horizontal desktop
Niri is interesting, but made my mouse go crazy.
first: gnome current: gnome favourite: niri honourable mention: kde least favourite: cosmic (probably as i used it from an alpha that probably wasn’t ready to daily drive yet) longest used: no idea, i’ve used niri, kde, gnome, xfce and leftwm for considerable periods of time future: i want to go back to niri at some point, just using gnome for the convenience for the moment
Favorite: KDE.
Least Favorite: Gnome, but I’ve not tried a ton… It’s slick but way too opinionated for my tastes. I could change most of what bothers me about it with add-ons and mods, but KDE gives me the controls I want out of the box, and lets you do damned near anything you want before you even start installing mods (I don’t understand the person who thinks it’s too limited and Gnome is more flexible, but different priorities, I guess)
First DE: KDE on XanderOS… To be fair, the name sounded cool to young me and I didn’t know much of anything about the different Linux distros yet. And I think Ubuntu either wasn’t around yet or hadn’t gotten well enough known for me to have spotted it initially
Honorable Mention: Unity… Love it or hate it, Ubuntu was trying something actually interesting and I think it’s a shame they didn’t stick with it longer
Current DE: KDE
Potential Future DE: not sure, KDE does everything I want at this time, but I might give Cosmic a try, and/or a tiling WM, though I suspect I won’t care for it (I’ll give it a real shot to convince me, I just don’t see the appeal)
Longest used DE: KDE
Current distro: Mint with KDE shoehorned in, though will be OpenSuSE Tumbleweed in a couple hours (I love Mint but I’m tired of fighting with old packages and drivers, and suspect that might be the cause of graphics stack crashes that have plagued me… Also because I’m tired of waiting for KDE 6 for years now and it’ll be probably mid next year still before it’s available on Mint, and even then still only as an afterthought)
I’m a Unity denier since childbirth. In hindsight it feels like Apple lite.
POP! Os pulls it off pretty well I think.
Sway all the way bay bay
I use Linux btw
What’s that at the top left? I can’t find a window manager named Cosmic anywhere. I’m addicted to hopping window managers, I’m curious what that one is like especially if it is tiling.
It’s a desktop environment, originally from Pop!_OS. It’s very new, and sometimes still slightly buggy but I really like it.
It’s a hybrid tiling or floating wm. The tiling mode is really good though!
What’s your beef with Gnome?
For me, it’s “use it the dev way or no way at all” mentality baked in.
If you like the GNOME way of doing things, you’ll feel great. If you don’t like any aspect of it, it will be very hard to rectify.
Interesting that you had similar experience with KDE, because mine is on the contrary. Whatever I could envision, it could be made with KDE - even the stock one. Essentially, you can even recreate much of GNOME experience within it, if you so prefer.
There is a whole extensions library for Gnome for customization.
Sure. But they are still more limited in scope in my experience, not to mention security concerns and other problems.
How is that different than KDE? You can recreate the KDE stock layout in Gnome too.
Basic layout - maybe, but barely the experience.
- Can GNOME alter the system behavior beyond keybindings? Stock KDE can. You can make it not just look, but behave like GNOME to the point you won’t notice the difference.
- Can GNOME freely edit all buttons everywhere in any Adwaita app? KDE apps can, and KDE can always edit any top bar buttons of any apps and make them do whatever.
- Can GNOME easily spam as many elements as you want everywhere and edit the hell out of them to your heart’s content? Stock KDE can.
- Does GNOME offer graphical, WYSIWYG, zero-config, zero-code way to alter any look and feel element of the system? Stock KDE does.
- Can GNOME at least support some basic things like widgets without me having to reach for extensions? Stock KDE can.
KDE allows you to turn your system into anything you want without ever touching a single config, and this goes immeasurably beyond a basic layout. It all comes out of the box, too. I only faced GNOME after experiencing KDE, and it felt so heavily like walls and walls and walls everywhere.
Now, I’m not saying GNOME is bad, and this is not a fanboy contest. But customizability of all things is clearly a win on KDE’s side.
The point of Gnome is that you can’t do those things without extensions. It makes it way harder for grandma to fuck something up. But you can still do them. On the other hand I have found things that are easy to customize in Gnome with extensions, like laptop trackpad gestures, that are nonexistent in KDE with or without extensions as far as I can tell.
But like I said before, to each their own. We are just talking about two different approaches to the same solution. I often recommend KDE to people who are coming over from Windows, but after over 25 years of trying different ones I keep going back to Gnome personally. The only major exception was when Gnome 3 came out I spent several years on Mate (a fork of Gnome 2).
KDE has trackpad gestures for 4 years now, but user configuration is still pretty much nonexistent. Don’t know how things are on GNOME’s end, but since you say it’s customizable there, I’ll give it a spin sometime!
To each their own indeed! I remember my ex specifically asked me to install GNOME as her first DE as she stepped into the Linux territory. Who was I to object? :)
idk… it just feels very locked down, and honestly every time i’ve tried it, there’s been some issue with it. I feel like it’s not customizable enough for me, and also the themeing is inconsistent.
That’s honestly exactly how I would describe KDE, but to each their own!
you would describe KDE as… not customizable?
Inconsistent
And I had that same reaction when you said Gnome wasn’t customizable.
Probably never found the widget store.
Maybe OP likes a more Windows-like UI
That’s not really my issue. I actually prefer MacOS like-interfaces, although in the grand scheme of things I don’t actually care. I mostly just want to be able to choose what I want though.
People talk about how gnome is the obvious choice for people coming from a Mac, but, well, I came from a Mac and I hated gnome. It wasn’t Mac-like at all, it just felt oddly locked-down, with loads of wasted space. The suggestion that Mac users would like it tells me that those people have never actually used a Mac.
Meanwhile, I can quite easily make Plasma look like macOS if I wanted to.
Has anyone cracked the launcher bar in Plasma 6 since Latte Dock didn’t make the jump?
What do you mean?
Latte Dock isn’t being maintained any more, right?
It was the only one I could find that replicated the MacOS dock aesthetic and behavior and it’s used in all the drop-in global themes, but it’s doesn’t run on Plasma 6.
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