Personal preference for sure, but I love Xfce! Does any tweak I want it to do without feeling heavy, or like 1999 (Mate) or like option overload (KDE, Cinnamon). Currently running Debian 12 Xfce and it has been really good so far. More new user friendly than Debian 11 was I think.
With all due respect with XFCE which isn't that bad, it is nowhere near the customization capability of Trinity (KDE 3.x). And I'm not talking (just) about theming or visual effects, I'm talking of useful features that even on windows are hard to get w/o third party SW. Just an example, on multimonitor setup try to set an application to start always on monitor 1, regardless the mouse position, regardless where you closed it the last time you used it. or set another application to start in a fixed position, maybe, w/o any decoration. Or allow root login. Or import all the windows fonts from the nearby windows installation And so on Do that from the Gui w/o touching a single .ini or .xml or whatever Sadly all of such things were already there in 2003, and many of them were already present in 1998 or so when the first KDE alpha builds where made available. Then in name of the novelty someone decided it was time to start from scratch and the ugly, slow, buggy, bloated KDE4 was released. Since then KDE has slightly improved, but will never became as light and useful as KDE3. Thanks god there is still intelligent life on earth and the guys of TDE keep it current and workable with current kernels and userland
KDE does look great and I have tried it briefly, I just found it far too complicated. Trinity might be the bees knees but it looks very dated from the images on the website. I just want my desktop to be easy to navigate and look good/modern.
I totally would not debate you on that. From what I've heard KDE is even pretty light on resources these days too, so a top notch DE from the sound of it. For me though, it is massive option/dependency overload. Too many options to where I can't even find the one I want, and I don't have any option I want that Xfce does not have, so for me, I'm good with Xfce. "K.I.S.S.". @Kin100 the look of it being dated is probably more the chosen theme than the DE itself, as with any of them. Default Xfce does not win any beauty contests either, but with the right theme and icons, any of them can look very nice. Personally, I like mine clean and simple though. I can do without all the bells and whistles, transparency, shadows, floppy windows etc. Give me a little color and contrast and I'm good!
Just try it once, instead of hearing (the Q$OS ISO is live). There is no overload of nothing. TDE, needs just the QT3 and few other minor packages, everithing is selfcontained in one repo, and everitying is so automomous that is installed in the /opt directory. A directory that you can even move to a different distro (maybe not even debian based) and that likely start as is w/o further intervention. No other commonly used desktop environment can do this not even the minimalist LXQT/LXDE. Perhaps the whole TDE (including office apps, games, developer tools, educational tools, math tools and so on) is something like 200MB, but you haven't to install the whole thing the "core" and "minimal" metapackages are there for a resaon. On the other hand XFCE looks small-ish just because it relies on gnome's GTK2/GTK3 crap, that usually comes already installed in many distros that consider GNOME a first class citizen and everything else an optional. This has nothing to do with Kiss, this is just preinstalled bloat. This is not objective, this means just you're used to XFCE oddities. Just take a random user that has never used it, and ask him to move the main panel from top to the bottom (or viceversa) w/o having to google to understand what to do and count the minutes it takes (if ever succeed in the operation) In TDE everything is where is supposed to be, the windows manager is the TDE's windows manager not an alien piece of SW used by it, so the WM options are integrated not split across completely different and unrelated configuration tools, the same applies for the session manager and so on. There is no competition here, at least there is no competition from XFCE or LXDE/LXQT which just belongs to another league.
All good points. I have tried it though, and found it to be option overload and found a few things that are important to me that I could not find any way to achieve. I can't remember now what it was, but yeah, like I said, not knocking it at all, just not for me. And yes, half of it is probably just my familiarity with Xfce, but...I was trying them all before I got familiar and Xfce is the one that felt "like home" to me, the most user friendly/sensible. I think most or all of that Gnome bloat would almost have to be there anyway due to other programs depending on it...unless you go all in to the KDE environment and use all KDE/QT based apps. *Right click, panel preferences, unlock, drag, relock. Put it on the top, bottom, sides, big, small, deskbar, expanding panel, auto-hidden or not, transparent or not, 1 of them, 2 of them, split down the middle into two, big/little icons, anything whatever you can think of. Still, I may install and try out KDE again.
If your'e talking about Q4OS, keep in mind that it has most options hidden You need to sudo kcmodules --unlock To go to the stock non dumbified options. But again calling overload something that has an option to do something is a bit unfair. Say the Windows 1511 I'm typing on right now has 45 items on the control panel (+33 ones on Administrative tools), Windows may be criticized for a lot of things, but for sure not for the excess of settings. Why a Linux desktop should be any different? What I always say is that the aim should be to have smarter users, not dumber OSes, what we are getting now, thanks to Steeve Jobs and the crowd of companies that try to ape his ideas, is the exact opposite. That's somewhat true, and is a demonstration of the economical power of the Americans, no one wold ever admit, but Gnome was supported more than KDE for nationalistic reasons rather than real technical merits. KDE was felt mostly as an European thing, and the not so latent US nationalism did the rest. For the record the same happened in other areas, thing to bluetooth (developed bu the Swedish Ericsonn) that was bashed for almost a decade by the American corporations, that tried to impose the Wireless USB standard in any way, then happened that people started to understant it was really useful. I don't have a XFCE handy, and I don't remember exactly the steps needed, But anyway I would expect that the position is an option of the panel proprieties, it works this way in Windows Kde, TDE, Gnome2/Mate, LDE and so on. Dragging should be a further option, welcomed alike any alternative) but for sure not the only one. Like it or not Win95 established some GUI standards (that proved to be hardly perfectible), that should be respected by anything is even vaguely inspired to it.
Interesting. I find KDE quite easy to use. The reason for it is that the default settings are already pretty much useful. Anybody coming from W11 should have an easy start with it. Sure you can get lost because KDE offers a lot to customize. But one can leave most at default. The KDE desktop is superior to windows 11 IMHO. KDE neon is for KDE lovers, but I am using Kubuntu LTS 2022 since I need it as a productive system and don't need the latest KDE version. It currently runs KDE plasma 5.24.7 a very smooth experience. KDE4 had lots of quirks and wasn't smooth at all. Had a lot to fix manually myself. When I started with Linux I tried mint first, but since 5 years I am on Kubuntu. I love KDE and it looks pretty good.
Never tested extensively Budgie, so I can be wrong. But when I read "Its design emphasizes simplicity, minimalism, and elegance" i start to see the ghost of macos". The point is that make elegant something functional like vivaldi or TDE is relatively easy. Making functional something that started with the wrong feet, is way harder (and usually never happens).
Possible one of the most noticeable things in Debian 12 was the inclusion of LXD/LXC on their repositories. No need for snap in order to get LXD anymore!
Upgraded, and nothing "assploded". Really liking Debian 12.x so far. Very nice going to the source and not all these *buntu, McMinty middlemen.
Yes, nice distro, anyway, some jobs to make a confortable desktop with all needed stuff. couldn't agree anymore very nice too, about "systemd cancer" Pros: More features, possibly eliminating other components you'd need, like monit/daemontools or separate cgroup management Easily manageable config, no need to write long init scripts or fix existing ones. Just write what to start, what it requires and maybe limits on process cgroup if you need it. Builtin tools provide great overview on what is currently happening (systemctl show/list-jobs) well designed dynamic dependency system ,in general providing shorter boot time Cons: Much more complicated More to learn that just "that init thing starts scripts with start/stop commandline parameter" New. bugs.
That's completely against the *nix philosophy. Do one thing and do it well. systemd is written by a macos user, and is turning Linux in a macos lookalike black box. With this pace systemd will end to replace even Gimp or VLC That's highly debatable, maybe it's true for distro maintainers (who indeed embraced systemd, no question asked), a lot less for normal users. It's nice when everything works as expected, but very troublesome when what you expect is different than what systemd expects. Frankly grep is everything you need to filter any info you need from a good old text based log, it worked for 40 years, still works today Again debatable to say the best, current version of Sys V init are *way* faster than current version of systemd, let alone open-rc or runit (which are optional in Devuan). Let alone the situations where systemd decides to wait for a "job" forever, because a small mistake, a small misconfiguration, or a systemd bug. Sys V init used to be not especially fast but that was 7/8 years ago, and 7/8 years ago there were init systems which were way faster than SysV, (einit, init-ng and so on) that were dropped for no reason in favor of systemd Agreed here That said recent version of Debian are supposed to be init agnostic, in theory installing an alternate init system shouldn't break the system like happen in other distros. Devuan just makes the process less troublesome.
This! Can't tell you how many times shutdown was just hung for eternity "shutting down cups whatever service blah blah blah****time to wait****~until you unplug it!!1" Not so often on Debian, but some other sytemd distros it's pretty frigg'n common, and stupid annoying. I may have to take a peek at Devuan. MX is decent too, but I find it a bit 'bloated' with stuff I don't care about and the point was to avoid ALL middleman's preferred apps, bluetooth, foreign languages, etc. etc. pre-installed.
If you hate bloat, start with netinstall ISO setup (or even better use the deboostrap way) and you can tailor your install whatever you like. BTW the normal live is way less bloated than MX, It's especially nice in Daedalus (Debian 12 level) the option to create the initrd with only the modules needed by your machine, you loose some portability, but the initial part of the boot will be almost istantaneous.