What desktop environment do you use?

[ill88eagle]

Windows

Why don't you make a windows thread? This thread is specifically about *nix systems.

On topic: I've been using Xfce for a couple of months and am quite happy with it. I was using lubuntu for years and was happy with that too until they fucked up the DE. V 19.04 was buggy as fuck. Xfce is notorious for screen tearing but it's only an issue when watching videos and I do that on my raspberry pi with libreELEC/kodi so no biggie...

I want to try out arch with wayland on the pi, but haven't gotten around to it yet

[RobertX]

Did you try KDE since they went to version 5 though?

Sorry for not addressing this question. Now I'll answer it: no.

I am a die-hard Linux Mint user, and though one-dimensional, it served me well. The designers did not include KDE as one of their desktop versions since forever, I think, but since I found Mint to be suitable for my needs, I just disregard KDE.

As per your advice, I'll try a KDE5 system.

[Fant0men]

after using it for more than 6 hours


then i restart it


here seems to be a significant difference in RAM usage between when i start and after a few hours (by opening the same applications)

RAM leakage seems to be a common problem in a lot of software, especially desktop environments. It's not just MATE that has that issue. I haven't checked in KDE yet, but I will check the size of the kwin, plasma_session, plasmashell processes next time I login and then after having run the session for some time. It seems like it doesn't leak a lot, or at all, since I've kept this session running for 5 days now, and whenever I close my browser or VLC I get back all that missing memory.

I don't know exactly why RAM leaks happen, but it must have something to do with keeping old data around for longer than it's needed.

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Windows

Why don't you make a windows thread? This thread is specifically about *nix systems.

On topic: I've been using Xfce for a couple of months and am quite happy with it. I was using lubuntu for years and was happy with that too until they fucked up the DE. V 19.04 was buggy as fuck. Xfce is notorious for screen tearing but it's only an issue when watching videos and I do that on my raspberry pi with libreELEC/kodi so no biggie...

I want to try out arch with wayland on the pi, but haven't gotten around to it yet

I wish I was using Wayland right now. In GNOME it works great, and I did use it with Wayland for around a year. The KDE team is working on Wayland support, and it does already support it (with bugs), but it's going to take a while for it to get stable and reliable. The instant it does get ready, I'm switching. Sadly, most DEs / WMs don't seem to give a fuck about Wayland, but I'm glad that I'm using a DE where they're at least working on it.

I used Xfce for probably around 6 years or so on my old machine and had no screen tearing, which is why it surprised me when I got tearing on my new machine. My old machine had Nvidia, and this box has Intel. I don't think tearing happens because of the hardware, but it's probably driver related. Maybe they changed something in the compositor / window manager in Xfce? Still, desktop composition and double buffering barely works in X as it is, so it might also be some X-related issue. Seems like some DEs have hacked their way around this problem, since I have no tearing in GNOME or MATE. I used to have tearing in KDE (a year ago), but it's gone now. I don't know if it's due to a newer kernel, newer Intel drivers or newer version of KDE, but at least it works.

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Did you try KDE since they went to version 5 though?

Sorry for not addressing this question. Now I'll answer it: no.

I am a die-hard Linux Mint user, and though one-dimensional, it served me well. The designers did not include KDE as one of their desktop versions since forever, I think, but since I found Mint to be suitable for my needs, I just disregard KDE.

As per your advice, I'll try a KDE5 system.

In Fedora, the dnf package manager has something called "group packages", and there's a group package for most, if not all, desktop environments. The apt package manager in Mint probably has something similar. It's been a few years since I used a Debian-derived distro, so I don't really remember. But my experience is that you can install any desktop environment you want, no matter if the distro supports it officially or not.

Yeah, give KDE a try sometime I haven't had an issue with it since I installed the KDE spin of Fedora a few weeks ago. It's due to history that GNOME and GTK-based DEs won out, and that's because the Qt toolkit used to be proprietary. It's a bit sad that the KDE community isn't larger, since that means development will go at a slower pace too. It's a great DE, and it's older than GNOME or GTK. KDE was the first DE for Linux, if I recall correctly, so it's kind of cool that it's still going strong.

[RobertX]

One question before I return control to the topic: if I want to learn about GNU/Linux intimately, what should I read up on?

Now, back to topic: have any of you tried running GNU/Linux without its desktop environment?

[Fant0men]

One question before I return control to the topic: if I want to learn about GNU/Linux intimately, what should I read up on?

Now, back to topic: have any of you tried running GNU/Linux without its desktop environment?

Never tried running without a desktop environment, though I still do spend a lot of time in the terminal and in the TTYs. I usually run my important shit (like video encoding) in a TTY. That way I don't lose my work if the DE session shits itself and bugs out.

I could get by without a DE, but it would be pretty boring, and text-based web browsing in the terminal is just terrible and boring. I guess you could still listen to music, watch movies and that stuff in the terminal, but still...

I like pointing and clicking on things. I think the GUI is a great thing, though it can't do everything as well as you could in the terminal, and vice versa. Both user interfaces have their use, and I think they complete each other.

I read some book about Linux early on, and it gave me some nice insights, though I don't really remember what those insights were I think just spending some more time in the terminal, learning the basic commands and how to navigate around the filesystem, and the system in general, is how you best get intimate with Linux I started out just reading man pages, when I first started learning the terminal. You start with the simple shit, like cd, ls, pwd, cp, mv, rm etc., and then advance from that.

Also, messing around with Systemd (systemctl) is also good. Then you'll learn what services are actually running, necessary and how to stop, start or restart them. You can list all Systemd units (systemctl --all list-units), for example. Reading the Systemd log (journalctl -xe) is also pretty interesting, if you want to see what's going on behind the scenes on your system.

All in all, you'll advance fast if you just use Linux more, because issues will arise and then you learn how to solve them.

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I checked the memory usage of my current KDE session (that's 5 days old). To be honest, its RAM consumption is pretty low, so that's good. In MATE, the mate-panel process would usually grow to 1GB or more with time.

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So, I figured out how to restart KDE without ending the session.



And, sure enough, the plasmashell process shrunk from ~300MB to ~80MB. It seems to grow rapidly though, so I'm guessing it eventually settles @ ~300MB, or maybe it even grows beyond that if you keep the session running for longer. I'll do some more testing.



Restarting the 'plasmashell' process doesn't automatically restart 'kwin_x11', but that can be restarted separately (as shown in the commented lines in the 1st screenshot). Though, restarting it doesn't seem to be necessary, as it stays around the same size consistently. It's only the plasmashell process that grows in RAM usage.