Linux Desktop Environment Face-Off: Which GUI Is Best | Hacker News Reader

Linux Desktop Environment Face-Off: Which GUI Is Best

tomshardware.com

16 pointsjlpcsl13 comments

gnome has taken some heat lately so i feel obliged to share some love for it. it's a great DE in that it stays out of my way when i want it to and it offers subtle help to things i need it to (window manage, multitask, etc). i think in 2020 it beats them all (including macos and win) ️

I just came back to running Linux as my primary OS and went for Fedora 32 with the default Gnome install; overall I’m blown away at how great the experience has been so far, everything works well out of the box (for many years I used Ubuntu and had endless problems with basic stuff like audio and networking), and the desktop environment feels incredible, it manages to combine the minimalist uncluttered feel of dwm or xmonad (when in app) with the kind of rich experience of MacOS when navigating to an app or settings. Kudos to everyone involved.

There's lots to like about GNOME. I would say its one of the most polished desktops with lots of first party apps for it. It definitely has the best search of any DE. But I would have a hard time recommending it to most people I know (at least vanilla GNOME). It just breaks too many workflows.

They removed desktop icons which I don't use but lots of people do. The removed the minimize and maximize buttons meaning you either have to close apps or move them to another desktop. The most annoying one for me is that they removed the system tray which just straight up broke a bunch of apps (mostly sync clients like Dropbox).

Now, all of those features can be added back with extensions (which may break in a future release) but I don't thing most people want to deal with that.

Thankfully there are distros like Ubuntu and Manjaro that patch GNOME and add back in missing features.

grab gnome tweaks (some distros include it). it exposes many of those native settings for you (desktop icons, min/maximize buttons, etc)

Cool, I didn't know desktop icons was an option in Tweaks now. I'll check that out next time I use Fedora.

Xfce is undoubtedly my favorite, but it's gradually adopting all the trendy crap they're strongarming into gtk. Expect full client side decorations and super huge widgets in the next release.

I love the fun configurability of Xfce. And that it stays lite even with all the goodies installed. Recently been appreciating Cinnamon for kinda the opposite, in that I don't think about tweaking much, it's just simple and standard for my old brain; balanced, like this article says.

What concrete advantage does a desktop environment offer me over just running a window manager like dwm? I've tried it both ways, and all the desktops seem to do is take up resources while offering little in return. Can you describe a significant way that your desktop improves your computing life?

Good defaults

I've asked this question several times, and this is the best answer I've seen yet.

Automatic monitor setup (plug in/out), audio controls, notifications

User switching, sane session locking (+ automatic locking), better accessibility (e.g. you can use mouse to do pretty much anything)

Which is the best? I don't know.

Which should you use? The same as most other people, so we can get some actual work done. Right now thats gnome.

Having a crazy efficient setup that only you in the office understand isn't good for collaboration.

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