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Comment by unicornporn | Hacker News Reader

I actually just went back to Linux after 11 years of macOS and I can't say Gnome 3 does it for me either. 10.6 was my favorite version of OS X and I think that OS has been going mostly downhill from there.

When switching I realized I've been spoiled with well thought out design and UX, but I must say I really enjoy the simplicity and polish of MATE DE[1]. It's sort of like traveling back to a time when a desktop was a desktop (oh boy, am I getting old) and not a shopping mall were I'm supposed to buy stuff and have my habits tracked and measured.

[1] http://mate-desktop.org/

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If you want a DE that is almost as lightweight as MATE, but has a more modern feel I would recommend Cinnamon[1]. There is also a Fedora spin if you prefer that to Debian based distros.

I've been using Cinnamon as my DE for about a year now and I absolutely love it. The biggest thing that made me switch is the fact that it just works. GNOME would shit the bed every time I docked my computer into its docking station, Cinnamon handles it just fine and can even remember my monitor configurations.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinnamon_(software)

Isn't cinnamon a little cpu/gpu heavy, and therefore power hungry? I tried it a year or so ago and it ate my battery for breakfast (and iirc it was pretty RAM heavy too, but my memory might be failing me here) - switching back to xmonad sorted everything out. Happy to be told I'm wrong, Cinnamon was very pretty and it'd be a nice option for tasks where my xmonad setup gets stuck on (Arduino/Processing and fullscreen VLC)

> Arduino/Processing and fullscreen VLC

You might find LXDE to be a good choice, it is quite lightweight and I have had success with it for both of these. Extending the desktop across multiple monitors was a bit tricky though, but this was about 3 years ago so that may have improved.

Nice, I'll give it a try - I currently switch to xfce for this but I'm not overly attached to it

The macOS issues have forced me to just not be too dependent on the DE that much. I use the hot keys to open apps (command + spacebar), and 3 finger swipe to activate app switching [1]. Other than that, what is most important to me is HiDPI rendering and seamless multi-monitor support. For the most part this works in macOS and is still hit and miss in Linux unfortunately.

[1] I'm not sure the last time I opened Finder. It's easier to manage files from the terminal.

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