There was a good thread on bboard (in the UNIX board) this week about favorite
Desktop Environments on Unix-flavored machines, and I thought I'd cross-post
and expand on my thoughts here.
My primary computer is currently running GNOME with some customizations. I know
everyone likes to hate on GNOME, but I actually find it pretty good now. At least,
up to date GNOME. I feel like a lot of the frustrations with GNOME on, say, Ubuntu
is due to the outdated packages. I've migrated most of my Linux desktop usage to
Fedora and find that I rarely have the errors and bugs that I constantly had on
Ubuntu.
Besides, I'm trying out Silverblue (and really enjoying it honestly), and GNOME
is kind of required for Silverblue. (I know Kinoite exists now, but I haven't
had great experiences with KDE, so I thought I'd start with the normal Silverblue.)
I had kind of an interesting start with DEs- my first Linux distro was Ubuntu
Natty Narwhal. Unity was new and raw and bleeding and terrible. (So almost
everything has seemed great to me after living with Unity for years lmao.)
After a few years on vanilla Ubuntu, I migrated to Lubuntu due to the age of my
laptop at the time. I ended up getting pretty involved with the Lubuntu
distribution as a result. This was all pre-LxQt (which is abominable in my raw
opinion). But because of my involvement with the distro I've always had a soft
spot for LXDE and still use it on occasion.
Since then, I've bounced around a few things and eventually found the best fit
for me with GNOME, or at least, GNOME with some personalization, and fresh and
updated as possible as long as the hardware can handle it.
I do have one laptop that definitely can't handle it. It's currently on MATE
but I don't know that I'm really a fan of MATE. I don't use that laptop for
serious productivity (it's too small for most things - I mostly carry it because
it's so small but can still fire up a nice shell to home when I'm travelling.)
I also have played with XFCE and may want to give it a shot for real at some
point.
The thread on bboard did make me want to try some of the lighter-power
desktop managers that were mentioned in the thread. I've seen cool demos of
dwm, and I've known other people who swore by i3. I don't know much about
fluxbox, which was mentioned by several people - so maybe I will also add
that to my list to check out when I can.
But for now, I think I'm sticking with GNOME at least on this main computer
while I give Silverblue a good spin.
