- Fave: Sawfish WM
- First: Either KDE3 or Xfce, not sure which one was first
- Future: Sawfish hopefully
- Least Fav: Gnome, anything that's tiling
- Current: Sawfish
- Longest: Either Sawfish or Xfce, not sure which
- Honorable Mention: amiwm because it actually has the pull-down-the-screen thing
- Current Distro: Slackware
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2026
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Favorite DE: Niri First DE used: XFCE DE you want to use in the future: Niri Honorable Mention: Hyprland least favorite: Anything non tiling, or maybe Hyprland due to a lot of minor annoyances Current DE: Niri longest used DE: i3 Current Distro: NixOS and Arch
You should try Niri!
I've considered it, but i'm not sure if I like the scrolling tiling yet..
At first its novelty, then it starts to make sense, and then you can't live without it. I've tried to switch to other DE's a couple of times including similar ones like MangoWC and I always come back. I used Cosmic for 30 mins before I ragequit and went back to Niri.
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niri and dank material shell ππ
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Whatβs that at the top left? I canβt find a window manager named Cosmic anywhere. Iβm addicted to hopping window managers, Iβm curious what that one is like especially if it is tiling.
It's a desktop environment, originally from Pop!_OS. It's very new, and sometimes still slightly buggy but I really like it.
It's a hybrid tiling or floating wm. The tiling mode is really good though!
First: Gnome Favorite: Gnome Longest Used: Gnome Least Favorite: KDE Current: Gnome Future: Gnome
Used Cinnamon, KDE, XFCE in the past. Bucking the trend, I think Gnome is fine and does what I need it to do. You do you, though. That's what is great about Linux.
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Whatβs your beef with Gnome?
idk.. it just feels very locked down, and honestly every time i've tried it, there's been some issue with it. I feel like it's not customizable enough for me, and also the themeing is inconsistent.
Thatβs honestly exactly how I would describe KDE, but to each their own!
you would describe KDE as.. not customizable?
Inconsistent
Probably never found the widget store.
And I had that same reaction when you said Gnome wasnβt customizable.
Maybe OP likes a more Windows-like UI
That's not really my issue. I actually prefer MacOS like-interfaces, although in the grand scheme of things I don't actually care. I mostly just want to be able to choose what I want though.
People talk about how gnome is the obvious choice for people coming from a Mac, but, well, I came from a Mac and I hated gnome. It wasn't Mac-like at all, it just felt oddly locked-down, with loads of wasted space. The suggestion that Mac users would like it tells me that those people have never actually used a Mac.
Meanwhile, I can quite easily make Plasma look like macOS if I wanted to.
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Both my favorite, longest used and current DE would be MATE. Currently using it on desktop with Debian and a laptop running Fedora. Super customizable and very speedy. Beyond that I really enjoy Gnome but haven't used it in a bit.
Favorite: Cinnamon.
Honorable Mention: KDE.
Least Favorite: Gnome.
First: Gnome.
Current: Cinnamon.
Longest Used: KDE.
Future: Cinnamon
Favorite: KDE. The GOAT babyyy
Least Favorite: Deepin, due to the privacy concerns
First DE: XFCE
Honorable Mention: Cosmic. It is sexy with decent balance of customization & strong unified vision. It is early on though so not quite ready for prime time. Some bugs, and resource consumption could be better.
Current DE: KDE
Potential Future DE: Might see what thr fuss is about with WMs like Niri. It seems more complicated to set up than it needs to be, but I like the tiling and use of desktops sort of like GNOME but better.
Longest used DE: KDE
Current distro: Fedora KDE
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Niri + dank material shell over here. I absolutely love the infinite horizontal desktop
Niri is interesting, but made my mouse go crazy.
What's the DE you want to use in the future? I'm not great with logos. Thanks π
Favorite: KDE.
Least Favorite: Gnome, but I've not tried a ton... It's slick but way too opinionated for my tastes. I could change most of what bothers me about it with add-ons and mods, but KDE gives me the controls I want out of the box, and lets you do damned near anything you want before you even start installing mods (I don't understand the person who thinks it's too limited and Gnome is more flexible, but different priorities, I guess)
First DE: KDE on XanderOS... To be fair, the name sounded cool to young me and I didn't know much of anything about the different Linux distros yet. And I think Ubuntu either wasn't around yet or hadn't gotten well enough known for me to have spotted it initially
Honorable Mention: Unity... Love it or hate it, Ubuntu was trying something actually interesting and I think it's a shame they didn't stick with it longer
Current DE: KDE
Potential Future DE: not sure, KDE does everything I want at this time, but I might give Cosmic a try, and/or a tiling WM, though I suspect I won't care for it (I'll give it a real shot to convince me, I just don't see the appeal)
Longest used DE: KDE
Current distro: Mint with KDE shoehorned in, though will be OpenSuSE Tumbleweed in a couple hours (I love Mint but I'm tired of fighting with old packages and drivers, and suspect that might be the cause of graphics stack crashes that have plagued me... Also because I'm tired of waiting for KDE 6 for years now and it'll be probably mid next year still before it's available on Mint, and even then still only as an afterthought)
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I'm still an user of XFCE4. It just works.
Edit: Wrong DE name.
huh. I've never heard of that one.
Oh, sorry, it's XFCE4. I wrote it on my phone and gthe finger pressed the wrong letter.
Longest-used: XFCE, by far. Current: Wayfire + Noctalia 5.
Sway all the way bay bay
I use Linux btw
All of the boxes are KDE, except
Least favorite: GNOME
Current distro: Garuda
Tell me you use Arch (btw) without telling me you use Arch, btw.
well, I thought it was important since usually people using Cosmic are on Pop!_OS
i can't do these because i only have used linux mint and still use mint
Favorite: In usability KDE, in looks XFCE-winxptc
Least favorite: I3 (I can't be bothered especially when it's x11)
First: Unity
Honorauble mention: Hyprland (wasn't difficult to config)
Current: xfce-winxptc (it almost works perfectly for daily use but dolphin causes the theming to break and resets icons, but most importantly there's no search I have to use a keyboard shortcut for that.)
Longest used: KDE
DE I wanna use: xfce-winxptc with extra functionality.
Current distro: Cachy OS (First arch based distro that didn't black screen in the first month.)
Favourite DE & Current DE: GNOME. Simply the only one with a consistent and modern design.
Least Favourite: cosmic. This needs a lot more polish before I consider it anywhere close to an actual option. Currently it looks childish to me.
First DE used: Unity. It's been a long, long time.
DE you wanna use in the future: None. I'm done DE hopping, no DE can deliver the level of consistency and polish that GNOME can deliver anymore.
Longest used DE: Pantheon. On elementary OS. Gnome took a long time to get its shit together, but at least it did.
Honourable Mention: KDE. It's... Meh. It fixed some things consistency-wise, but it's still stuck in the past when it comes to UI paradigms. It claims customisability, it's only customisable in ways that barely matter anymore and can only break consistency. Insane workload on the app devs and the theme devs to have something working reliably as well.
have you used Cosmic recently? It sounds like everyone has outdated opinions on it. I've been using it for months and I would say it's long ready for daily use.
You really sound to me like a typical Gnome snob ngl
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I like hyprland, even tho the devs are assholes
I'm open to switching to similar tiling WMs but I've put a lot of time into my current config
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Here we go, because why not:
Favorite: LXQt+i3. LXQt plays nice with tiling WMs, GTK and Qt, and it's just way easier than installing a WM on its own. Tiling WMs are GOAT.
Honorable Mention: Crunchbang/early Bunsenlabs and Cinnamon Least Favorite: Gnome
First: probably Openbox on Crunchbang
Current: LXQt+i3
Longest Used: LXQt+i3
Future: sway, possibly with LXQt if I make the switch after the LXQt devs finish providing Wayland support.
Hehe. I love these. I wonder what's next? Text editors? Web browsers? Terminal emulators? Init systems?
I was a mite tempted to make a logo for my xmonad config, that I've whimsically been calling a window manager, called Tabularboonad for about 14 years. But really, it's just an xmonad config.
I was a mite tempted to attempt to wrangle some contrived reasoning, and positioning on the chart, for my wminizer scripts, since (similar to the prior distro one, with my bedrocklinux use), I do not limit myself to just one wm (or distro), and really, I can switch between any window managers I have installed (and have listed in one of wmnizer's wmrotate scripts (or the selection list, in the wmnizer2 branch)), such as xmonad, dwm, herbstluftwm, spectrwm, dk, icewm, openbox, without restarting X11(Xorg/XLibre/Pheonix/TinyX), keeping all my gui running seamlessly, as I switch wm in a split second. ... So if following the logic of BedrockLinux, that it's the distro I use, not the multitudes within/upon it, then instead of xmonad (+^)I should say wminizer [(oops, just realised i misspelled wminizer as wmnizer in the rudimentary logo I hastily scribbled for it earlier [when tempted use it here], lol, doh.)]. But, that's not the same. Doesn't feel right to try use that logic.
I suppose I should not have been so surprised to see xmonad show up so much in this one.
Whee. These are fun.
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first: gnome current: gnome favourite: niri honourable mention: kde least favourite: cosmic (probably as i used it from an alpha that probably wasn't ready to daily drive yet) longest used: no idea, i've used niri, kde, gnome, xfce and leftwm for considerable periods of time future: i want to go back to niri at some point, just using gnome for the convenience for the moment
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