Spent lots of time with Gnome 2.
In Dec 2024 I got hooked in Hyprland on Arch and have a cool rice for it. But I’ve tried KDE on desktop now with Parrot OS since Plasma is popular. Still need to find some cool dot files or rice it myself.
I’ve noticed SwayFX getting lots of love lately. I might use that as an option with Plasma but am afraid of conflicts. I’m excited about it since Linux has now officially replaced windows on my gaming rig, which is the very last MS computer left in my house.
Gnome with a ton of extensions and a Catpuccin theme for gtk apps
I’m using gnome.
Really enjoyed sway but lacked the integration I wanted, KDE before plasma 6 would break all the time and I liked but again lacked integration niri (a scrolling window manager)
KDE (on CachyOS)
I use KDE. I like how easy it is to customize pretty much everything. Like, if I want everything to be green, I can make everything green and no one can stop me.
KDE, but only with an extension called kröhnkite for auto tiling. To me a manual stacked window management system is almost unusable. As someone who used tiling window managers for years and lots of KDE based applications, and as KDE was one of the first who worked well in Wayland, I thought to give it a shot. I like it and since then (years by now) stayed on KDE.
For reference, I used Gnome 2 on Ubuntu, made the switch to Unity desktop, then Gnome 3 (and I think Gnome 4 too?, don’t remember). Then started experimenting with Regolith, auto tiling for Gnome, and tried out real tiling window managers, until I landed on qtile. Then experimented with Xfce, before finally making the switch to KDE (because of Wayland). Rest is history.
Oh my god, Krohnkite was so unbelievably buggy for me, it kept fully crashing KDE. I tried to get it to work for like a week, but eventually I just had to give up.
Its different now, and I mean it. I used Krohnkite in Plasma 5 when it worked well, but later it started to be buggy. Its a fork from the original BTW and the main thing that is worked on at https://codeberg.org/anametologin/Krohnkite . I think reason it was buggy is, caused by Wayland or when transitioning to Plasma 6, forgot. Then I switched to Polonium (kwin script) and it worked but wasn’t great. But Polonium started to be buggy too,… then Krohnkite was reworked, even the Kwin developers made adjustments so that Krohnkite works well.
I am using it again since Plasma 6 launch period and it works well. Krohnkite is not buggy and it even got some cool features, where you can dock any window to the side or top or bottom side in a smaller area, that will not interfere with the other windows for tiling in example. So all in all, if you think about using it, then I can highly recommend Krohnkite.
i don’t like tiling wm, and can’t stand seemingly random placement a linux d.e. usually gives (if not just centering everything every time).
i use the kwin script for ‘remember window positions’ to get behaviour similar to windows. gnome has something similar, too (‘smart auto move ng’). so now a window for a program will open right back up the same size and in the same spot next time you run it.
Lightly customized KDE plasma, it truly is just the best de out there. However when I’m feeling a bit playful and not looking to do actual work or using my laptop without a mouse I do switch over to hyprland sometimes.
Sway, it’s fast, pretty, easy to customize, and can do headless displays to stream with Sunshine.
What does headless display mean to stream?
Vanilla KDE on desktop, Niri WM+Noctalia shell on laptop. Firstly, because for some reason I cannot get any touchpad gestures to work on KDE, and secondly because the niri paradigm of horizontal tiling is just perfect for a laptop. I tried to use Gnome for a while before landing on Niri, but the lack of configurability and the reliance on extensions for basic functionality drove me nuts.
sway. I tried hyprland, but it was unable to switch between different maximized windows (monocle layout). There was a way, but it triggered a resize on every window switch, which was slow and annoying. I don’t know if it’s perhaps been fixed since then.
Gnome with the Forge extension for window tiling
I’ve been a GNOME user ever since I made the switch to Linux. Though, like literally over the last couple of days, I’ve been DE/WM-hopping.
The first address was Sway, but it felt (kinda) archaic… And while I’m positive that I’d be able to make it work, I wasn’t entirely sure if it was worth the effort 😅.
So, not long after, I couldn’t bear it anymore and switched to COSMIC. So far, I’m pretty content with it. GNOME required about half a dozen extensions to properly bend to my will. With COSMIC, it pretty much gets there without any external add-ons.
GNOME. I love the workspace management and simplicity
i3
With alacritty, qutebrowser, neovim and LibreWolf. I use my custom dmenu-based utilities for things like launching apps, locking (with slock), controlling (ie. postponing :D) redshift and music player and opening bookmarks, links and searches. Thunar is the most DE-like app I use but being comfortable with Bash i use Thunar just for certain tasks like organizing files like photos. (For quick text edits, I sometimes prefer Mousepad. For screenshots it’s slock+maim.)
I don’t “rice”, I just set some color schemes years ago and use simple wallpaper (which I rarely see.) And keep everything as minimal and out of way as possible.
(I don’t care about Wayland unless I’m somehow forced to. I mean, some of my utils depend on X11 for things like clipboard access but I suppose it could be fixed easily nowadays. However X11 works fine for me so if it ain’t broken…)
People tend to dislike this, but I LOVE gnome. It runs a lil heavy, but damn it’s clean, smooth, fast, easy & decluttered.
No dot files, no config, and it’s intuitive
Cinnamon
Rare breed mate. U on Mint?
