So I am an aesthetics guy when it comes to my distro and desktop environment. I like things to look clean and visually appealing. Last night I kinda took a deep dive into the world of different DE’s. Of course there’s the popular ones that everybody knows about i.e. Cinnamon, Xfce, KDE, Mate, Gnome, etc., however there’s a whole other world of random desktops that I was never aware of! Also it’s difficult to find a clear list of all the available environments.
Basically, how the heck do I find out more about DE’s and which distro they are compatable with. Of course I always check the distros site, but they usually list the big ones and often times will say “plus others”… how can I find out which desktops are available for which distros? I’ve find it rather tricky to figure out.
Another thing that kinda tripped me out is that it seems not all DE’s such as the popular ones I listed, appear to be the same visually. For instance, XeroLinux is very beautiful to me and from what I’ve gathered, it runs KDE Plasma. Imo it looks nothing like the actual KDE Plasma OS… are there like different versions of Gnome, KDE, Mate, etc. that look different than others? To me, I figure they would and should all look the same. Idk, it’s all a bit confusing to me and I hope you kind folks could shed some light. Thank you
I should mention that I have zero interest in the window manager or tiler or whatever they are called. To me, they are super ugly and very confusing to understand :)
Okay. There’s a difference between a Desktop Environment and a Window Manager. There are lots of Window Managers, but not that many DEs. Ive played around with a lot of them, and I thought I’d share my thoughts:
Hopping around to different DEs can be fun, but at the end of the day, the trick is to find one that has a workflow that works for you, or use KDE and make the workflow you need.
ETA: Somehow, I forgot to mention Mate. Basically, it’s an updated version of Gnome 2, which, to me, is an uglier and more awkward to configure XFCE. It’s not for me, but a lot of folks really love it. It’s so cool that we have a choice, and can be different!
I’ll add Trinity to the list. It started as a fork of KDE 3.5.
I haven’t tried Trinity, mostly because KDE 3 was a bad experience for me. It’s certainly an interesting project, though.
I tried it on my play-puter and while it was certainly nostalgic, it wasn’t enough to make me switch from Plasma.
I use Trinity as a daily driver, although I may be the only person on Lemmy who does. My Unixporn post
TDE has packages for (as far as I know) all major distros, although only two very minor ones (Q4OS and ExeGnuLinux) use it as the default DE. It is very much a traditional desktop environment designed for a keyboard+mouse setup, so if you have a touchscreen, it may not be for you.
That link definitely doesn’t go to unixporn for me.
Someone forgot to put the unix in the porn.
I have checked out screenshots of trinity and to me it looks sorta dated and weird… Unless you know of a distro that has a pretty version? Lol it is a different feel for sure
Also Budgie!
I have nothing against Budgie, I just haven’t used it. It looks pretty nice, though 😀
I don’t use Budgie either, just adding to this excellent and very detailed list of DEs.
The thing about budgie I’ve noticed from screenshots is that the environment looks vastly different on each distro that supports it. IMO solus looks way best, but at the moment solus is up in the sir lol
There’s also NsCDE, the modern version of CDE
Never heard of this, I’ll have to look into it and cde for that matter
An updated CDE? Well I’ll be truing that out for certain!
NsCDE is my desktop on Slackware, Slint, Void, and OpenBSD. I guess I’m most comfortable with it.