What desktop environment do you use?

[Fant0men]

All you *nix users out there, what desktop environments do you use?

I've tried most of them briefly, but I'll list the ones I've used for any considerable length of time:

* GNOME 2
* GNOME 3
* MATE
* Xfce
* KDE 3
* KDE 4
* KDE 5

I've up until now mostly kept to GTK-based environments, since I started out on GNOME 2 and many of my favorite apps are GTK-based. But I'm slowly changing my mind...

I've always thought KDE was pretty, even back in the KDE 3 days. I thought KDE 4 was cool as well, but it was pretty buggy and slow, at least when I tried it, which was pretty early on.

Apparently the KDE developer team has done some major work on the graphics side of things, so everything is now handled by the GPU. And it shows. It's very snappy, and KDE is now surprisingly lightweight, especially if you turn off Baloo, Akonadi and a couple of other Background Services. KDE looks much better than MATE and I think it even uses slightly less RAM, or at least there's less RAM leakage (hardly noticeable). I can keep a KDE session running for days without a problem, whereas in MATE the "mate-panel" process would just grow out of control in RAM usage. Eventually I just learned to "killall -15 mate-panel" periodically to keep the session going. Otherwise, the old trick is to log out from the desktop and log in again. That's how I keep my uptime going strong. That KDE is even more lightweight than MATE is pretty hilarious considering that KDE has way more features and a more advanced window manager (KWin), that has lots of eye-candy animations built-in (no need for Compiz). I don't have screen tearing in KDE anymore (did have that last time I tried KDE 5) and everything on the desktop (incl. animations) is snappy as fuck.

I also really like the KDE file manager (Dolphin). I think it's much better than Nautilus (GNOME), Caja (MATE) or Thunar (Xfce). It's more responsive than Caja, which I've used for some months before this.

I've been running the KDE spin of Fedora for a few weeks now. I'm really happy with it.

I'm not a programmer (I only do scripts) but my brother (who's working as a programmer) tells me the Qt toolkit is much easier to program for and more portable than GTK. He says GTK and GTK-based DEs are a mess (code-wise).

Seems Audacious is one of those apps that switched from GTK to Qt:




A little screenie of my KDE desktop:




Feel free to post screenshots of your desktop.

[RobertX]

MATE all the way!

Xfce is kind of primitive.

Cinnamon has lots of frills I don't need.

KDE lags my system.

MATE is all right. Not as lavish as Cinnamon, but it's enough and does the job fine as it is super fast.

[Fant0men]

MATE all the way!

Xfce is kind of primitive.

Cinnamon has lots of frills I don't need.

KDE lags my system.

MATE is all right. Not as lavish as Cinnamon, but it's enough and does the job fine as it is super fast.

Did you try KDE since they went to version 5 though? It's been on version 5 since 2014, if I recall correctly. Since version 5, it's gotten much lighter than it used to be. I just forgot about KDE during those years and happily ran Xfce, which is probably the DE I've used for the longest time in total. I like Xfce because it's very lightweight, although last time I tried it (about a year ago) I had major screen tearing in it, which surprised me.

MATE is a very nice DE too, but I think it's way too heavy on system resources for such a basic DE. Xfce is even more basic, but if you compare MATE with KDE, MATE is very basic. Besides, MATE is based on GNOME 2, so you'd expect it to be as light as GNOME 2. I know for a fact that GNOME 2 was much lighter, as I still have videos recorded of my old Ubuntu desktops from that time.

Cinnamon I tried briefly, but it made no sense to me using what felt like a re-skinned GNOME 3. Might as well use GNOME 3 then, since it's quite stable and reliable these days.

[RobertX]

Well, I did, with Kubuntu, it slowed my Pentium 4 considerably, but so did Unity of Ubuntu.

That is why I switched to Linux Mint. Mint used to have a KDE, but they have since scrapped it, having from four desktop environments to choose from to three; it was more lightweight on the old beastie.

Do keep in mind that the Phenom Triple Core was not bought yet.

[theSEMAR]

[Fant0men]

Nice one, bassedul I did use MATE for about a year before switching to KDE. I had no problem with it other than high RAM consumption (leakage), but I found ways around that. Do me a favor, check the difference between RAM used by "mate-panel" directly upon login / boot-up, and then after having run the desktop for hours or days. For me, it more than doubled in size, indicating something is clearly wrong with it. Maybe that memory leak will be fixed in the future, but I'm surprised they haven't fixed it yet.

Then again, VLC Media Player also has a RAM leakage problem. If you open a big playlist / play a movie on repeat for hours and hours, the "vlc" process will grow to a ridiculous size. I only noticed that because I frequently fall asleep with movies on repeat. I don't understand how the VLC developer team hasn't noticed this, and if they have, why they haven't done anything about it.

---

Well, I did, with Kubuntu, it slowed my Pentium 4 considerably, but so did Unity of Ubuntu.

That is why I switched to Linux Mint. Mint used to have a KDE, but they have since scrapped it, having from four desktop environments to choose from to three; it was more lightweight on the old beastie.

Do keep in mind that the Phenom Triple Core was not bought yet.

Unity was total and utter crap, no doubt.

But it sounds to me like you ran KDE 4, not 5, considering you mentioned Unity (which was around back then).

[RobertX]

theSEMAR a GNU/Linux user! And a MATE user too!

Let's give him a round of applause!

---

Here's mine, do look at it! Bullet Club for Life!

[Fant0men]

theSEMAR a GNU/Linux user! And a MATE user too!

Let's give him a round of applause!

---

Here's mine, do look at it! Bullet Club for Life!

Nice one, RobertX

[theSEMAR]

...Do me a favor, check the difference between RAM used by "mate-panel" directly upon login / boot-up, and then after having run the desktop for hours or days. For me, it more than doubled in size, indicating something is clearly wrong with it. Maybe that memory leak will be fixed in the future, but I'm surprised they haven't fixed it yet....

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)

[RodneyYouPlonker]

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

Well in Windows you get all that, lots of background processing that happens. Not just about running certain Apps there's everything else at the same time.