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Someone enlighten me. How many active desktop projects are there currently? (Not just window managers…)
KDE Plasma, Trinity (is it active? Fork of KDE 3.5)
Gnome, Mate, Cinnamon (fork all the things!), or “reskins” like Unity or Budgie?
LXQt, Xfce… Is enlightenment still active as a project?
Does anyone use Deepin – appears to be a partial fork of KDE (kwin, etc.) with new desktop environment built around it rather than use Plasma.
Or Pantheon (Vala+GTK3?).
Cosmic is from the ground up, recent and active I guess.
Missing anything?
Yeah that checks out.
I’m fairly new to this space so not aware of the more obscure or older ones but my list of popular Desktop Environments would be:
- KDE Plasma
- GNOME
- Cinnamon
- MATE
- Budgie
- XFCE
- LXQt
- Cosmic
Here’s a decent list: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Desktop_environment#List_of_desktop_environments
Arch based list obvs so won’t include every single one but not too shabby.
Deepin was my long running DE for a while until they changed to be more windows like and I ditched it for budgie. Shortlived as it just wasn’t being maintained and updated enough for my liking. Moved to Pantheon for quite a while but it got annoying having to fix it breaking with updates. I ditched it and was going to go back once they released the distro agnostic version. I don’t know if that ever eventuated because I gave up waiting and have been happy with KDE for several years now.
The list is great! But it doesn’t really tell us which ones are actively developed. Running historical DEs is fun sometimes. For example, LXDE doesn’t really see a lot of development compared to its successor, LXQt. But once again shows the the Arch Wiki is the best ;)
I guess people do occasionally compile KDE 1.x just to see if it still runs on modern systems (it does, but obviously some underlying things have changed over the years, like the audio and graphics stacks). But that isn’t the same as being actively developed :)
Window maker is still being develop, I think
Moksha Desktop as well
Yay my new desktop :D
I’m using cinnamon, but want to use the new plasma on a debian based distro. But nothing is supporting it out of the box just yet.
But yes, there are a lot
Yeah Debian and new don’t usually go hand in hand unless you use one of those distros designed around Debian Sid.
If it’s stability I suppose Fedora doesn’t usually get much complaints in that dept. and they have much newer repos
If your using debian: you can ig backport kde 6 from debian testing or sid,but just a warning you might sacrifice stability.
Am also very new and debating between Plasma and Cinnamon. KDE is generally more versatile, right? Idk.
Personally I found kde buggy and kinda ugly and outdated,cinnamon was a better experience + less ugly maybe cause of gtk.
I would go kde plasma everyday. I always find little things that limit what I am trying to do on cinnamon.
Not big things, little trivial things. An example is wireless hotspot. I cannot change the password through the gui. Why? Dunno. Deal breaker? No. But those are the little things that kde has right.
Long time Cinnamon user that has recently spent some time in KDE Plasma here.
Going from Cinnamon to Gnome, I often feel limited because Gnome has no problem saying “You can’t do that.” Nemo has more functionality than Nautilus does. Gnome applets are often minimum viable or less, Cinnamon is usually most things you need, most of the time. Cinnamon’s USB image writer is still my favorite.
Even though I often describe KDE’s interface and applets as being full of options and settings and capabilities, switching from Cinnamon to KDE doesn’t feel as freeing and enabling as switching from Gnome to Cinnamon. Options you never need don’t make you feel more free. It often feels overcooked. Compare how you customize the panel in Cinnamon and Plasma, KDE just has…more. It’s not more because it does more, it’s more because they didn’t stop making things.
In some cases I think KDE is technically more capable but Cinnamon is more pragmatic. Also I’m a lot more used to Cinnamon. I know how to do things the Cinnamon way.
There’s some functionality I don’t use like KDE Connect which looks cool but I’ve already got things like Syncthing in use.
I do sometimes end up wandering through KDE’s settings menu trying to find the thing I need because I don’t know exactly what to call it. Like, I’ve noticed that it has kind of a sticky effect when you try to move the cursor slowly across the boundry between two monitors, like it’s trying to be helpful and keeping you from overshooting. Except invariably I was reaching for the scroll bar, overshot, and now it’s “helpfully” keeping me from slowly reaching back across to the second monitor. If there is a check box somewhere to turn that off, what would it be labeled and what category would it be under? Mouse? Display? Desktop? Windows? I come across things like that more on KDE than Cinnamon, again possibly because I’ve been on Cinnamon for 10 years and know what most of the options do.
I have had some deal breaking issues but I’d blame them on Fedora rather than KDE. Long rant shortened there’s just less software available for Fedora because the .rpm repositories are empty, Flatpak is deeply imperfect and no one writes compiling instructions for Fedora. If you try translating the apt-get commands for installing prerequisite libraries to dnf commands often it fails because that library isn’t in the repos at least not under that name. So if the software manager lets you down, which it does more often on Fedora than it does on Mint, the hike through the desert to get what you need is longer and along rougher trails.
Very helpful, thanks!
What do you mean by flatpak being deeply imperfect?
Flatpak often trips over its own feet with their attempt to sandbox apps, they hamstring their own capabilities by not having the necessary file system or device permissions. Attempting to use the Flatpak version of Steam for example, it couldn’t see my games library because it basically had no file permissions. Yes, this is the packager’s fault and not Flatpak as a whole, but why do so many packagers fuck this up?
Flatpaks also install in /var for some reason rather than like /usr or somewhere that makes sense, and they have commands like “flatpak run com.steam.Steam” or whatever rather than just “steam” so a lot of pre-existing machinery fails if you’re using the flatpak versions. Flatpak essentially breaks any case where you pipe data into or out of an app. A recent example I ran into is trying to use MakeMKV as a blu-ray decoder for VLC. A major selling point of Flatpak is it can’t do that.
I had a higher opinion of Flatpak when I entirely ran Mint Cinnamon and it was an additional software source. Fedora treats Flatpak as the main source of GUI apps, a lot of them aren’t available as .rpms and it’s worse.
my same exact opinion and experience as well.
I still think it’s a good platform for the “Linux version” of certain apps, like Slack or something. Package it as a Flatpak and you’ll reach the vast majority of distros in one shot. But it needs some elbow grease before it’s the right tool for managing all apps.
an i switch back to the old layout n stuff?
Im really not jiving with this new lookAt least with Linux Mint, you can still choose any of their older themes (Mint-X, Minty, Mint-L), so I expect them to still include those.
This theme is only for other distros, not Linux mint and for those it depends if they ship both versions of the theme (over wise you can install it manually)
so how do i change it back without downgrading
If your distro ships it, just go to Settings > Themes > Style and select the one you want. If your distro doesn’t ship it go on Advanced Settings > Add/Remove and then you should be able to find it there (you can also manually get the theme and decompress it to ~/.themes if it isn’t available in the theme repository)
Changing themese does not change the dialogue menus and popups
does it still use the same amount of ram as windows? :/
What are you doing that cinnamon uses that much Ram? For me it is like half the ram idle compared to windows 10. Maybe a bug?
tbf it probably is still significantly less that windows, i was being a bit facetious…but it’s still at like 1-1,5gb idling on a fresh boot (this is the whole DE, not just cinnamon)…
i did a fresh install with mate on an old machine though and it was a lot less (the usual 500mb or something) can’t see anything suspicious running though - and yes I did check without any stuff running in the background like steam which is also stupidly intensive with their webkit nonsense
RAM is there to be used to make things faster.
electron has entered the room
