Poll: Linux users, what desktop environment do you use?
For those of you that use linux, what is your main desktop environment?
I used to use other stuff, but GNOME and KDE are "good enough" and I can make most of it disappear with extensions. I've tried tiling window managers (XMonad, Awesome, i3) and a few other DEs, and honestly, I find myself fiddling with them a lot, which isn't very productive. I use KDE on openSUSE because it's the default and works reasonably well and GNOME on Arch because it has worked reasonably well out of the box.
So yeah, I'm tired of fiddling with stuff and I trust both major DEs to properly implement Wayland and other tech without impacting my user experience much.
The defaults are, by far, the closest to my needs.
Also, more importantly, I've been using the "traditional" desktop for 2 decades and I just can't change my way - the taskbar+menu is my crutch.
On lower end machines, it's xfce.
(I'm a masochist)
My point is, you cannot draw any conclusion on Linux users because they use it for different reasons and I certainly didn't start using it because I was not satisfied with Windows: I was mostly curious I guess, and liked the little games that came with Mandrake 9 (I was a child).
Most Linux users don't make their own desktop anyway. And you cannot blame people who write their own desktop manager for fun and let express their creativity in their free time, or to implement their vision, or to fit their need. They possibly wouldn't have contributed to any existing solution anyway.
What's more, you don't seem to have done much research before this heavy, misguided critic. Speaking for the two big desktops, first we had KDE. But the FSF was disatisfied with the fact that Qt was non-free. They started three projects:
- a free reimplementation of Qt.
- lobbying for Qt to be freed.
- an alternative, free desktop: GNOME.
The second and third projects succeeded so the first was dropped. But by the time the second project succeded, the third was already well advanced. That is why we have Gnome besides KDE. For ideological reasons, not because someone was not satisfied by KDE and decided to create GNOME instead of contributing to KDE.
The reality is more complicated than what you say.
I am sorry that you were annoyed by colleagues using Linux but your perception of them is not an accurate representation of the world. And I can see that KDE (or Gnome indeed) is a good solution, thank you very much.
I also get the people who can’t afford a legal software lic for Windows and instead of pirating, they use Linux. Also, upstanding humans who I applaud, but they’re inflexible in their ethics. Good? Bad? Certainly different.
I’m just pointing out that using Linux on the desktop is impractical, driven by reasons that aren’t objectively “better”, and the people attracted to it are doing it for reasons which reflect more on their personality (inflexible) than the underlying technology, and the reason for the fracture in Linux desktop managers is due to the users personality traits.
And for the record, I’m right on the borderline of using Linux on the desktop, but each time I start down that path, I question - why am I really doing this?
Honestly, I don't blame you for asking this as I also ask myself the same question every-time I use a Linux distro. Even as a software developer, I just want to get my work done which I can do on my Macbook or my PC which has Ubuntu dual-booting with Windows just fine. I try to ignore those miscellaneous "Ubuntu app has crashed" problems I get every now and then but then again, I only use Linux to test some software I wrote which has been ported to the platform.
I don't really bother with editing those dotfiles or sudoing my way into customising the whole GUI via a config file deep in the system folder. Sure, it is a free and open-source operating system which is great, but if touching a setting results it in resetting the whole OS, then back to Windows it is for me.
Try disabling apport in /etc/default/apport
Or with the command: sudo systemctl disable apport
Yes, it sucks having to do that.
There will be cases where the trade-offs involved for a specific user mean Linux isn't really a viable option. For some, there are different trade-offs that make Linux an attractive choice.
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Personal note: Even OS X seems bloated at times to me, and I don't mean the pre-installed packages. I mean things like the number of options for some menu bar selections. Also, for pdf viewing out of the box viewers for many Linux distros win hands down compared to Adobe (if you are simply looking to read pdfs). In 'utility' programs like Adobe, you might have 200+ things you can choose to do. With a Linux viewer you get like 5-10.
Gaming and lack of Office are the primary downsides. Steam mitigates the first to a non-trivial degree. If Google would just improve the robustness of Docs and Sheets a bit more, then some of the of more robust and beginner-friendly distros would (I bet) get some more traction.
I like coding on my Mac, and the experience of using OS X to be best described as "solid". I miss spending most of my time on Linux though.
Being flexible on principles is acting against your (core) values, and making compromises is not always even the most pragmatic thing to do. Not saying you should never make compromises. First, nobody is perfect. Second, everybody has their own thresholds and this is fine.
You say that you are borderline of using Linux on the desktop. Surely you have a motivation behind that? You need to answer the question you raise at the end of your comment before switching. Switching OSes can be a bit disruptive and it takes time to adapt. It takes will. You should not change for the sake of changing. Here are hints though:
- you think that free software is the way forward. People should control their digital life.
- you think that open source is the way forward. It's just a way more efficient way to build software, frees us from perpetually reinventing the wheel by building "common goods" and enables meaningful and powerful collective work, even across companies.
- you like Unix. You think that it is a nice way to organise and design an operating system.
- you like package managers on Linux. apt install stuff, or click stuff in the store, and boom, it is installed. No bullshit, everything is free, no demo versions.
- no tracking, no ads, no hidden shenanigans, no need to have a Microsoft or Apple account to have updates.
- you like having the right and the possibility to modify or study any piece of software you use.
- you like a fast boot and virus free environment.
- you like being close to your development environment.
- you find KDE/GNOME beautiful.
- you like the customization the ecosystem enables.
- you are curious and like to explore new stuff.
- ...?
To each their own. What's more, I find Linux practical, but not everybody does and there are downsides to use Linux instead of a more mainstream OS (app support, help, ...) :-)
It's really not. It might not be the best choice for what you want or are doing, but it's not generally "impractical".
The problematic nature of the Linux desktop is due to the inability to have a standardised and integrated desktop experience but instead its community goes for an ecosystem of having alternatives of alternative subsystems competing with themselves rather than improving upon each other. I don't want to spend hours googling and customising different settings all for it to suddenly break and then reseting the whole OS to fix it.
There is only one version of macOS and Windows to test against but thousands of Linux distros that behave differently with many DEs, Window Managers, audio subsystems, packaging formats and the list goes on. As a software developer I can imagine that it is harder to test a GUI app on several Linux distros than it is on macOS and Windows since tracking down the fault of the issue may involve switch/upgrading either GNOME, KDE, GTK, Wayland, X11, libDRM or even Linux itself. This is just too much work.
> There should be one answer.
The closest answer to having a 'consistent Linux desktop' is ChromeOS.
Besides, The main function of the Linux world is developing computational solutions, not bring people desktops for money.
Linux is used to make money much different than that, ask the users of supercomputers, or people that develop communication systems.
If only it was that simple. Turns out nobody wants your improvements and can't even understand and be convinced they are improvements, unless you follow their vision and policies and try to change your use cases to adopt to that and work on their idea of improvements. And then there are corporations, like Red Hat, that want to control linux desktop and are spreading this bullshit how linux desktop is bad because there is choice and not a single desktop environment they control.
> Linux on the desktop is a sign of someone who doesn’t recognize that a solution is good enough and accept it.
It's the other way around. You really have to be able to recognize and accept good enough to switch to linux desktop, because this is what you will always be after when using it.
I really dont care what desktop.
So, there is an explanation about why Linux desktop users use different desktop environments that is completely unaccounted for by your macOS/Windows-centric theory. It also helps explain why there might always be more than one option.
Also, for what it's worth, the Common Desktop Environment was never that popular with Linux users but did become open source relatively recently.