change wallpaper
i used cinnamon in 2016 (worst time i think), then i briefly used gnome in '23. i’ve been using kde since '25 and i regret i have no desire to use anything else anymore.
want a tiling wm? - just install a plugin and customize kde within 5 minutes
want to build a mediabox with a simple ui for use with a remote on a tv? - just adjust the sizes and find one of a million widgets!
do you want the ms win98 look? - it’s 3 clicks away!
i am sure other DE’s may be better for my specific usecases. but the flexibility of kde gives me good enough results within a familiar environment. i can change my whole computer experience in a few clicks and revert whenever on the same de!
Khe Khing Kabout KDE Kis Kits Kobsession Kwith Kits Knaming Kheme.
They dropped that for new programs years ago.
At least I know what your least favorite fighting game franchise is.
Kreet Kriter? Kuper Kmash Kros? Gnortal Gnombat?
That’s a pretty dumb reason, but that’s what’s been putting me off for so long. Oh well, I’m a konvert now…
Well, tiling window managers exist.
I’m still stuck on i3 and sway. I hear there’s a version of KDE that is tiling…? But I haven’t found anything definitive on that.
I’d place i3 and Sway deeper down the rabbit hole …
I mean they are, but my mind and fingers have been so twisted by vim that I can’t really interact with floating wms without feeling honestly pretty intense discomfort. I see people having fun with their cool Plasmas etc and I wish I could make the leap, but every time I try I just bristle at all the mouse use. The lack of control makes me feel like I’m trying to use a computer while wearing oven mittens.
My point is - why go backward? You already have your Sway[1] based setup, configured just the way you like it, with the ability to switch various components in and out. What does a monolithic[2] environment like KDE have to offer you?
Assuming it’s Sway and not i3 because I assume you have already switched to Wayland. You switched to Wayland, right? You need to switch to Wayland. Why are you not switching to Wayland? ↩︎
, Yes, you can tweak KDE, but since all the various parts were created to fit together switching one will always result in awkward UX. ↩︎
Kwin supports tiling, although nothing stops you from replacing it with i3.
I’ve heard this which made me assume it was like an option I can just enable, but every search has only come up with some baroque scripting or configuration guides, which seems like a lot more work than just using an actual tiling window manager.
E: Oh I get it now, you just install Krohnkite. This is a bit of an improvement, I will admit.
Yes, scripts like that exist (or replacing kwin). I don’t do it anymore, so I didn’t have recommendations, but may check this one mentioned.
I would love to give GNOME an honest try, but there are so many ways in which it feels like it’s actively working against me. In KDE I can for example create as many panels as I want on as many monitors as I want. On GNOME? There’s an extension to put the panel on another monitor, but then you can’t use the dock. I guess the GNOME developers don’t use multiple monitors? I mean you can’t even set different wallpapers on different monitors without a third party application.
As for Niri, Hyprland and all that… Yeah, they’re cool, but I’m too old nowadays. I just want shit to work, even though I do miss some of the functions that exist e.g. on Hyprland that doesn’t exist in KDE. But on the other hand, the developer of Hyprland is an asshole, so I wouldn’t really want to promote or use the project anyway.
to me, gnome seems to be just bad ui design for people with stockholm syndrome about it.
I just install 1980s pong OS. Humans should have stopped at this, So much is simplit times for us yes.
Cinnamon > KDE
I’m waiting for Cosmic to mature
It has so many great ideas, all it needs is time and polish.
I tried Cosmic for a week. It looked nice but I returned to LXQt because I want:
- To display time in ISO 8601 without also messing with locales
- To customize my file manager columns
- To use Emacs in a terminal emulator
- To not have my windows scattered to the four winds every time I lock my screen because the fancy window tiling feature is half-baked
- To have the X window manager back. I’m sure some people with use cases besides mine that are compatible only with Wayland, but I simply don’t see the need nor do I wish to be a guinea pig submitting bug reports when so many guinea pigs before me had years of their lives sacrificed polishing X.
Also, the performance of programs like the default Cosmic file manager was much slower then comparable alternatives like pcmanfm-qt which I know run fast even on 2005 Compaq laptop hardware.
niri forever
Cinnamon is my favorite. KDE is #2. Not crazy about Gnome or Cosmic.
“Am I interested in other DEs?” and “Will I install them?” are two different questions though. Yeah, I had fun running i3 years back, but i3 isn’t the new hotness anymore, and there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of me feeling like I have the time to learn and configure another WM. Absent my suddenly striking it rich and having entirely too much free time, I sincerely doubt there will come another time where I feel like I have that sort of time and nothing I’d rather use it for than such a mundane and endless task.
Just switch to sway. As far as I know, the config should be compatible (if you swap the complex utils for Wayland ones). But I haven’t tried it (I do use river and really like it though, so I do recommend sway).
Edit: see this:https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/i3-Migration-Guide
We only need xfce, let’s delete the others
I still miss Windowmaker. :(
the first DE I used on Linux was cinnamon and I was like “wow, this is great, everything makes sense to me out of the box”
And then I tried Gnome and was incredibly put off by it, like “why the hell is this over here, this layout is strange to me. Why are all these unconventional features on by default, this is very annoying.”
And then I tried KDE and I was like “wow, this is great and everything makes sense to me out of the box, also there’s all these features and options, I don’t know what they do, but i don’t have to interact with them if I don’t want to.”
Desktop environment, and OS in general is just something you eventually find one you like, and there’s no need to change. It’s GNOME for me, it just works in a way that doesn’t get on my way and that’s all it needs to be
I love Gnome. People love to hate it, but it’s workflow is SO good.
I think people just get annoyed that they can’t force it to be whatever they want it to be. Which is fine, that’s why other options exist!
But if you really go to the content-focused, workspace + keyboard shortcut flow Gnome is incredibly efficient, consistent, and stable.
Unpopular opinion #2: I love libadwaita and GTK4. Basically, I enjoy when devs are opinionated about things and build what they want to see in the world.
The adaptive part of libadwaita is really exciting for different form factors!
This guy has a preference that differs from mine! Get him! /s
Yeah idk, I tried Pop with GNOME and just wasn’t feeling it. Switched to Mint Cinnamon and it’s a little more intuitive for me. I’m just a general user, gonna game if/when costs come down enough to build a desktop to replace my 2015 laptop. By then, I’m sure another distro will be a better fit for me. There are options for a reason.
Do you have to run GNOME with PopOS? I was thinking of trying PopOS
cannot recommend pop with their new cosmic DE, it’s quite bad. looks nice at first, but the more you dive in, the more it lacks basic stuff and you start noticing soo many little bugs and annoyances. had it on my laptop for a while, eventually just installed gnome. it started crashing frequently and suddenly i could no longer start steam, so i just installed ultramarine since it has been playing nice on my desktop. and it has just worked since.
Pop now uses cosmic
mint/cinnamon was definitely the best i found until i checked out kde neon. mint still has a better package ecosystem but in neon everything feels slickly designed.
What’s the difference between plasma and neon
neon is the full kde distribution i guess, you can install standalone as its own os. plasma is just the desktop manager shell, can possibly be installed on top of other distributions. (im probably not using the correct terms.)
Oh, that makes sense. I have EndeavourOS with KDE as my desktop environment, but I’m still learning what’s plasma vs. kwin vs. sddm vs. x11…
Like I get one’s the graphical shell, one’s the window manager, one’s the desktop manager, and one’s the compositor, but what each one does and how their responsibilities differ is still kinda foggy to me.
It makes sense that neon is the distro, though. That makes sense because I saw it listed as an option when I chose Endeavour.
And I absolutely hate Gnome. But thank god we have over a dozen DEs to choose from. One of the great things about Linux is user choice.
Exactly. You can install your beloved distro with just what software you want there, because it’s your fucking device
It’s GNOME for me
Sicko
No kink shaming! Bsdm is a valid way of life! (Or so I wa told)
Openbsdm or Freebsdm though?
That gave me a good laugh. Gnome doesnt feel right to me at all man. To each his own.
But yea, sicko fr
Same, and the OS is Ubuntu for me. I use my computer to get stuff done, not for distrohopping (though that’s also a perfectly valid usecase if you find it fun 👍)
Yeah. I was also at Ubuntu after couple years of distro hopping, until they made a change I didn’t like so I just hopped to Debian and been there past 3 releases
DEs from one distro to another can feel different too, idk what it is about Manjaro but it feels so much more responsive than KDE’s own distro. So I think it’s worth trying our different distros even with the same desktop environment
true, like cinnamon is perfect on mint, but for example fedora cinnamon feels very wrong. it’s been a while since i tried it, but it definitely wasn’t as stable, and i had to change a lot of stuff from dconf editor, like for example the location bar in the file manager always defaulted to text mode even if you switched it to link mode
I like gnome on my older gaming desktop. It’s a 2080 ti so when i installed plasma was not super stable on nvidia but I wouldn’t change it, arc menu + dash panel and I’m all set. I prefer kde on the laptop though. All the extra bells and whistles feel more useful on a laptop (no mouse).
That’s funny, because I started using GNOME on my laptop because it seemed to fit the workflow on it better. Eventually I swapped to GNOME on desktop too
