Which desktop environment do you prefer?

Which one?

I've been using Gnome as on Ubuntu over a year. There are things I like about it and I don't like about it. Since I'm planning on switching to a different distro or an environment, I need some preference before I make choices.

 

I use gnome or xcfe, depending on what I'm doing.

 

Lately, I have been using KDE 4.1 a lot. I never used to be a huge fan of it, but I am impressed with the latest release. I also use LXDE from time to time.

 

I used to hate Gnome but recently it has added the features I was missing and I like it. I also like KDE 3.x and KDE 4.x(just beautiful). I am waiting for KDE 4.x to get a little more stable and add a couple of small features I am missing, but I think it will be ready for me in 6 months to a year. If I want something real fast and minimal I love Fluxbox, though it is not considered a DE but rather a Window Manager. So all in all I can't vote in your poll since I use multiple versions

 

I really like Gnome, but that is probably because that is what I am used to. KDE (I've only tried 4.1) feels too cluttered too me, but I might give it or xcfe a shot when I get my new computer.

 

GNOME is my desktop of choice due to it's simplicity, although I hate the file manager with a passion.

When KDE 4.2 comes out, I will definitely install a Kubuntu system with ReiserFS!

 

C'mon, where are the KDE users ?

 

I was using Kubuntu 8.10 for a little while and loved it, but it had some show stoppers for me so I had to go to Ubuntu 8.10. For my laptop, bluetooth was a problem. For my desktop printing was a problem, so I had to change.

 

I use Gnome on Arch Linux. I used to have it setup like this, but I uninstalled because I gamed a lot at the time. A few weeks ago I set Arch back up and it's amazing.

 

Gnome is my poison probably because that's what I used 1st and I am used to it.

 

Gnome for me too, although I like openbox its very sleek nice and minimalistic. Has anyone tried Crunchbang Linux yet?

 

Where's fvwm.

Just kidding. That was nice when I was running Slackware - (or was it Yggdrasil?) on a Thinkpad 750Cs with 12 MB of RAM and a 25 MHz 486.

I'm using Gnome because that comes by default on Ubuntu.

I don't know if I can credit Gnome, cups, Linux or whatever, but my last printer install was a jaw dropping experience. After I installed Ubuntu 8.10 on a Thinkpad T500 and configuring wireless (which amounted to no more than entering my WEP password) I clicked on the "add printer" icon. The system found my networked printer (HP 2550n) and in a few more clicks it was fully configured. That's pretty amazing compared to what that used to require.

best,
hank

 

Here KDE Gnome just bores the pants off on me anymore

 

KDE, but that's probably a combination of several things:

*It's similar to Windows, which makes it easier to transition too. And its general layout does seem fairly logical to me.
*Gnome has the taskbar at the top, which reminds me of MacOS9, which is bad memories. Gnome itself didn't seem bad when I used it, it just inevitably was associated with things that were.
*Mandriva, which I use most, defaults to KDE, and I've yet to find anything I can't do well with it.

I can use either one, of course. Or Sun's Common Desktop Environment (CDE), as packaged with Solaris 9 (though I'm not a fan of that one - I'd take KDE or Gnome before it). Xfce looks cool and I'd like to try it, but haven't yet, so I don't know if it actually is useful features or just eye candy that makes it look cool.

Of the K's, I prefer Mandriva 2009's KDE 4.1 to 2008's KDE 3.5, but am using 2008 and KDE 3.5 anyways because of some odd behaviour from the GNU C Compiler when I install it in 2009. So I'll probably wait until the next Mandriva release to move on from that.

 

gnome doesn't have to have anything at the top..

edit: gnome here too, though I'm trying to move toward compiz standalone

 

Since using gnome, I hate having the main bar at the bottom. It looks terrible in windows having it at the top though.

 

I started with KDE but I prefer Gnome simplicity.

 

I love Openbox + trayer. I know its not an environment, but I have been using openbox for years and will never switch.

 

Toss up between KDE 4.1 and Gnome, you really should add more options.
I use openbox from time to time though.

 

I prefer KDE and thought 3.5.9 was fine but I'm getting used to 4.1.

However, I have experienced some glitches and I'm not sure what is going on. I apologize for interrupting the desktop environment comparison but what does it mean when the KDE 4.1 menu immediately turns all black with orange/purple 'noise' when you first click the menu button (the 'K')? This has happened in LiveCD mode and in an installed Fedora 9 KDE edition with INSTALLED Nvidia drivers even.

I have yet to determine the cause or explanation. I thought it might be some bugs in KDE 4.1 but so far, I can't confirm.

Any ideas/theories? I don't see how it can be attributed 100% to my computer but I'll consider anything unless otherwise proven.

 

Sorry, I'm still a noob to Linux and couldn't think of any other than what's put up now

I think putting up your system's spec. would help us finding the solution. Does it happen with other os's - Windows, etc.? It looks like VGA flaw to me since I had a similar experience with Mandriva on my old PC with Geforce 6800 that was almost 4-year old. The problem was gone when I put a different VGA card, and came back when I put 6800 back in. It is, however, just a suggestion.

 

I guess it could be the card but it still has to relate to KDE 4 in some way?

It's a EVGA 7950GT.

It only happens in KDE 4.1 regardless of the distro. Also, it happens most often just after the distro boots up but that could just be me noticing it especially after the distro boots up.

 

I like both Gnome & KDE. KDE a little bit more..

I am using Ubuntu 8.04 & Suse 11.0 with KDE 3.59.

Cheers

 

haha, no problem, we were all noobs sometime.

 

I like Gnome better than anything else.

 

KDE USER i dont like gnome it look simple doesnt look powerful like kde
with all respect to all gnome users

 

Also, the BSD distros all use KDE as their 'pretty' desktop versions. I wonder why.....

 

I tend to like GTK apps a lot more then QT apps. Thus, if I had to choose between the two; I would choose gnome.

 

KDE for the win! GNOME is for noobs

 

KDE is for noobs who wish linux was windows.

By default KDE looks like a super fancy Vista theme. It gives me mad bad vibes yo. That's what makes me stay away. Gnome is cleaner, IMO. I also like GTK better.

 

I don't much see the point of making Linux act and behave almost exactly like Windows. That pretty much leaves me out of Gnome and KDE. I prefer Fluxbox and Openbox, but I invariably end up with XFCE and its window manager. This is because while being less of a resource hog than the two big contenders, it still has all the functionality a person needs out-of-the-box without having to spend hours configuring things by hand such a printers, sound, etc. Gnome is very slick, and KDE has everything but the kitchen sink, but they have had to gradually become resource pigs in order to do what they do. As they keep trying to appeal to the "I must use the latest version of everything" crowd, Gnome and KDE-based distributions are rapidly getting into multi-core CPU only territory.

But it's Linux, so you can easily mix and match whatever you want to use. For example, you can install the whole Gnome or KDE setup, but still run XFCE's window manager, Fluxbox, Openbox or whatever over it. You can have it both ways.

 

I dont think that KDE "looks like windows". Afterall, you can't get much away from that standard. What makes Gnome so "different from windows" anyway?

Even though KDE user, when it comes to apps i generally like GTK apps over QT apps. I can run them all without a problem here anyway.

I guess it's really a bit resource eater lately:

Code:

erico@hp:~$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       2072732    [B]1225616[/B]     847116          0     429760     388392

But i'm happy with it anyway, if's beautiful and the development team is doing a great job so far.

 

Act like windows?!? Windows makes me feel like I'm locked in a cage compared to either. I like some things about openbox and fluxbox, but they feel too little. I dunno what you're talking about with the dual core thing. I run fancy compiz effects with my CPU downclocked and powermizer on. MY gpu doesn't even fully upclock when I really mess with things. You can also configure it to barely use any resources.

 

It looks like windows cause:

A. Default bar on bottom

B. Bar is bulky

C. Similar taskbar deally

I know all this can be changed, but I just prefer gnome and GTK

 

You might have been able to make a case that KDE 3.x looked similar to windows, but I think 4.x is quite a departure.

 

Most popular DEs are pretty similar- they have one or more panels/toolbars at the top and/or bottom of the screen with shortcuts, window lists, menu items, and the like. They have a GUI file manager that uses folders to represent directories. And they also have a window-with-a-menu-bar window scheme. Windows is this way, OS X is, CDE was, Gnome is, KDE is, XFCE is, IceWM is- the only ones I've used that aren't are Fluxbox/Openbox and TWM, which are based on right mouse clicks.

Me too. GTK2 just looks prettier than Qt IMHO.

You are actually using 404464 KB of RAM (398 MB) for applications. That 1.2 GB figure marked as "used" is application memory plus 429760 KB of disk buffer and 388392 KB of memory cached (preloaded, if you will) in RAM. As you leave your system on for longer, you will see the amount of "free" memory shrink to near zero and the buffers and caches increase. RAM is a heckuva lot faster than a hard drive, so the OS is simply being smart in keeping things that were being used in the past in RAM in case they are used later to speed up subsequent application load times. But note that buffers and caches rank lower on the totem pole than application memory, so if you fire up a big RAM-hungry program, it will claim the RAM and dump buffers and caches. So this behavior is just Linux being smart about keeping data at the ready. By the way, "free -mt" subtracts buffers and caches to give you the amount of RAM applications claim.

Now if you want to see a boatload of RAM being used, this is my desktop at the moment:

Code:

 free -mt
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3967       2499       1468          0         88        807
-/+ buffers/cache:       1603       2363
Swap:         4102          0       4102
Total:        8070       2499       5570

Yup, 1600 MB of RAM being actively claimed by applications. The reason is that it's a 64-bit system and everything takes a bunch more RAM than on a 32-bit system, plus there are a few things running. I have a SMP Folding@Home core going that sucks up about 400 MB or RAM, X takes up 100 MB, Firefox takes up 125 MB, and the couple of tabs in Firefox that use the crappy wrapped 32-bit Adobe Flash player suck up about 100 MB each. If I had OpenOffice running, add another hundred megs or so. But if you think that's bad, my wife's laptop with Vista Basic 32-bit takes over 2 GB to run the same amount of stuff

I've used KDE4 briefly and it is nice, but it is most certainly a work in progress, while Gnome is a bit lacking in features but pretty stable.

 

gnome all the way its simple but effective

 

I like gnome, I'm used to gnome, but there's just some things like the autorizations and the fact nothing seems to be modular makes it draggy. I keep telling myself to try kdemod, but I just go back to gnome because I'm just not used to kde

I should just force myself more.

 

KDE feels like more organized contain lots of programs when set it up

 

ion wm here, when I used linux.

 

The lone vote for Enlightenment...

But I have successfully used Gnome and KDE in the past. I am thinking of adding KDE 4 just to see how it's improved.

I also have a Slack installation that's command-line only for nostalgic reasons.

 

Gnome for me, I guess because I tried Ubuntu first and liked it, although I did install KDE for Kubuntu and didn't like it as much... it seemed a little buggy to me, and although I didn't tweak it a bunch, it just didn't feel like it ran smoothly like Gnome did... even just switching between desktops looked like it would "hitch". No such feeling in Gnome.

 

Gnome is too simplistic for my taste. So, KDE all the way.

Both KDE 3.5 and KDE 4.1 are great, and well thought out. I clearly disagree that they resemble Windows.
If Windows would have made me only half as productive as KDE, I might have kept it on my drive ...

 

Can I ask you what you find helps with productivity? I haven't been able to use Linux for work, so I can only use it in my spare time to play around with.

 

Well, I am doing a lot of code development work, and quite some number crunching. I permanently need to have a number of terminals open
which are connected to several computers (for running and debugging different codes, etc.). Using KDE's konsole and "tabbed sessions"
I avoid, for instance, to clutter my desktop with a dozen of terminal windows.

With Linux I can also easily redirect the X Window output from a remote machine to my laptop, and I have all the programming environment (compilers etc.) that I use on big parallel computers. Plus I have OpenOffice for presentations, full multimedia, 64-bit, well I could continue ...

 

Very interesting... yes, Linux would be a definite must there.

For me, I use Adobe products, Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator... I have the newest versions, and they do NOT work in Linux... and unfortunately I can't just switch over to the "free" open source versions or use the 5 year old versions of those programs just to use Linux

 

What are some alternative file browsers to Gnome's Nautilus?

 

thunar, pcmanfm are 2 ones like nautilus. Gentoo is a split-view one like MC.

 

In addition to Thunar and gentoo, you can always use KDE's Konqueror, Krusader, or Dolphin. Midnight Commander (mc) is another, so is xfm, gnome-commander, and worker.

 

Which is the more popular/mostly used one?