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Comment by michel-slm | Hacker News Reader

The new Budgie flavor looks really tempting: https://ubuntubudgie.org/features

Not sure what it offers over just using SolusOS, to be honest (Solus is the main OS that develops the Budgie desktop). Existing Ubuntu packages, I guess?

That, indeed. If you want something lighter-weight than Unity or Gnome but based on the Gnome stack, running Budgie on top of your existing distro is a nice alternative.

One of these days I'm going to get it packaged in Fedora too...

I had a quick look at their site but I'm still not sure what they change from vanilla ubuntu.

Budgie desktop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budgie_(desktop_environment) vs Unity

Thanks! Still feel it is really hard to understand what kind of Desktop Environment it is.

I get that it is built on Gnome technologies but is it like gnome2/mate or like gnome3 or something completely different?

It is more like Cinnamon in a sense that it's built on GNOME3 stuff but arguably simpler and suitable for new users. It's not as customizable like MATE.

Looks like it's Ubuntu with a bunch more apps pre-installed.

After a fresh install I usually start with removing the apps I don't use -- games, accessibility tools, print drivers, cd burner, document indexer, default email client etc. etc. etc. So I guess this flavor would be the opposite of what I want...

Not a Thunderbird fan? What's your preferred mail client? I'm looking for something else; I've got my eye on Claws and Evolution but haven't started to play around with anything yet.

I've been using evolution for the last few years. It has a EWS (exchange web services) client that works really well for me at $BigCorp. I think I've had one or two crashes total, compared to outlook which crashes almost daily.

Prior to that I used gmail. When I used thunderbird it often seemed to spend all of it's time indexing. It has some nice plugins though.

Thanks for the reply, I think it's finally time I give evolution a shot.

til: terminix (gnome terminal emulator with tiling). Pretty neat. Interesting compromise for those (like me) who might like some features of a tiling window-manager, but prefer Gnome.

Oh, and other really neat feature: "terminix --quake" (https://github.com/gnunn1/tilix/wiki/Quake-Mode)

Nice. Personally, guake is still my go to (sudo apt install guake, info at github.com/guake/guake). Can't live without it.

Is there any difference between flavors other than the preinstalled software?

No. You can even have multiple flavors installed at the same time, eg. by installing both the ubuntu-desktop and kubuntu-desktop packages.

Is there anything that takes the flat look of Windows 10? I really prefer the flat simple look of Windows 10.

KDE Plasma? I haven't used it personally but from looking at the screenshots and videos featuring it, I think it looks good aesthetically.

And the trope that KDE is bloated hasn't been true for the past 6 or 7 years too.

I'll concur that it looks really good, but it's also pretty buggy. (fully updated KDE Mint)

Report them upstream if you have the time. I'm looking to give all popular DEs a chance in an Arch Linux VM pretty soon.

Ever since moving to just a window manager (awesomeWM to i3wm) I've not felt the need for a full-fledged desktop environment.

For KDE you might want to go with KDE Neon

https://neon.kde.org/

Elementary.io maybe?

There are some gnome themes that you can apply that might do the trick:

https://www.slant.co/topics/2087/~gnome-shell-themes

Try out Antergos 17.4 in a VM. I think you'll really like it. I personally use Ubuntu 16.04/Unity 7, but I'm very impressed with the flat look and sleekness overall. Antergos is based off of Arch Linux. https://antergos.com

Took a screenshot for you also: http://i.imgur.com/bPyvCsN.png

That's actually pretty nice! There goes my weekend. Thanks.

:) welcome!

In my opinion, Arch currently has the nicest package management system with the straightforward if excessively terse pacman syntax and the wealth of packages in the AUR. Considering this is one of the most noticeable differences between distros, it has made me stick with Arch with no plans of switching to something else. I've heard great things about Antergos as well, as configuring an Arch install clearly doesn't make sense for many users.

The thing I hate about the AUR is that you (usually) have to compile everything on your machine. Sometimes I hit a package that takes an hour to build and then dies because I'm missing a dependency that isn't installed by the script. And then that dependency has missing dependencies.

aurget --noedit --deps might speed things up for you, I have it aliased. It pulls in missing dependencies and skips editing the build scripts (I also use --noconfirm, but that's probably not the best practice)

It looks very similar to ElementaryOS

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