GNOME, because I started with Red Hat 6 and I'm used to it, on Fedora Silverblue, because I have a long history of fucking up my PC and that makes it harder. For remote machines XFCE because the mouse is cute.
Linux
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Currently I use gnome cosmic because of PopOS, integration and stuff. When I get around using Arch I'm certainly gonna get myself Plasma, because it's pretty af
KDE all the way, it's incredible especially since 6
trinity because it's lighter than almost everything else while having more features than almost everything else
i3. Superb for keyboard-driven environment. Ultra fast, so responsive and configurable. The best.
I love KDE. It's got easy to use power user features and is very robust.
KDE Plasma. It came on my steam deck which was my first intro to it, it blew me away and installed it on my laptop and finally ditched Windows shortly after. Works great for me.
XFCE. I also like tiling WMs, but I often have to share computers and they are too unintuitive for the rest of the family.
KDE on my main gaming PC, or if I want something that looks really modern and sleek without tons of setup/tweaking on another PC.
Mint with Cinnamon if I want a #justworks setup that is rock stable and I don't need to look sexy.
My side business laptop uses LMDE with Cinnamon for that reason. I need that thing to be rock stable and dependable at all times.
Cinnamon has been more stable for me than any other DE, and in my experience, is just as performant as other low-spec favorites like XFCE. My fresh install of LMDE with Cinnamon right after boot uses about 850MB of memory. My testing with XFCE was about the same, maybe 50-75MB less, which for my use case is effectively identical.
Not crapping on XFCE though, I like playing with it on one of my old thinkpads. Not a fan at all of Gnome, I've tried to like it for years, but I just don't care for it, and I experience quite a few bugs.
I plan on trying the new Cosmic DE soon, it seems like Gnome done better, and I could see myself liking it from the reviews I've watched.
Also Cinnamon main here, love the lightness of it.
It's really solid.
What broke with tracker3 ?
Idk,it would not run anymore.
Easy to force a tracker reset, or enable disable. Or even reinstall. Seems easier than findinf a new DE no?
Also tracker ahould not be using up so much diskIO or CPU like people mention, if it is it is tripping up on a files internal data, and status/logs will show which file(s)
Oh, I couldn't figure out how to reset or reinstall it so I just went back to kde.(also themeing which I didn't mention)
@BCsven @Mwa I disabled tracker and use plocate from a shell to find stuff. The reason, tracker's crawl of the disk space is extremely inefficient, but plocate keeps track of things like directory update times so does not recrawl a directory if the time stamps have not changed, thus saving a lot of disk I/O.
Alr
Tracker should not be recrawling everything, unless you delete the index with a tracker3 reset
Once it builds the initial index only new files or changed files should be recrawled for meta data.
The only time I have seen Tracker use cpu was when it got hung up on a file that had special code in it that was messing with parsing the data and so it would fail and retry over and over.
Windows 10
Because I am soft and weak from getting smashed every day at my 3 part time jobs and I just want to drink and play video games at the end of the day, not learn a new OS.
I promise to try Linux Mint when windows 10 is no longer supported.
Fair
I switched to PopOS from Windows 11 in three hours. I had been backing everything up for weeks though. Generally everything I did on Windows works out of the box on PopOS.
Aside from my bluetooth speaker not connecting automatically and needing to run a Windows VM for Corsair peripheral LEDs, I’ve not had to do a ton of customization.
It’s been well worth it. Really enjoying it so far and highly recommend.
My advice: Don't wait until you have to switch to start learning, it will frustrate you if you're under pressure to figure it out all at once.
Buy a cheapo SSD online, 500GB ones are out there for $35 and install Mint on it.
Use that to dual boot and play around with Linux. Start slow, if you get frustrated, take a break. It will be a much smoother experience than you probably expect these days.
Mint is very easy to get started with, very Windows-like in its UI. And it has easy options to install Nvidia drivers if you need to, and the app store is very easy to use.
People who are brand new to linux should start with immutable kde based distros, you'll have a much better time with fedora kinoite.
I'm down to help support infinitely, my matrix is available on my profile, feel free to message with any troubleshooting needs.
@communist @UltraGiGaGigantic I disagree, I started with Redhat and moved to Ubuntu, MUCH prefer the latter.
I started with Red Hat, moved to Ubuntu, now back to Fedora Atomic and very happy with it.
Yeah Linux still has plenty to work on. It's unfortunate how limited the support is. If game and app developers could target Linux, then the cost to support and maintain would be lower than they have to do with Windows. Unfortunately, market share and power of defaults work against us.
If you can, look towards getting a steam deck. At least that is a Linux thing that is pretty decent and portable.
I game on both the deck and a desktop with pop!_os. I can say gaming on my desktop is just as good if not better than the deck for because it can leverage my desktop hardware and it’s way easier to go under the hood with proper peripherals. Linux has come a long way with gaming. Most of the shit that doesn’t run on linux are games that cost too much for too little content or they’re just gonna be battle pass/cosmetic farms that cater to whales and aren’t actually fun in any sense of the word.
If you’re gonna be a top 0.0001% competitive gamer, you’ll probably wanna stick to windows. If you don’t play FPSes competively, a linux based gaming PC is probably fine. Me? I’m a middle aged dude with kids who racks up about 20 hours a week somehow, and linux more than suits my needs.
I’ve had more success with Lutris and Wine in getting certain abandonware games (Black and White for example) to run than I ever did on Windows.
I dont use a DE, I use a WM.
Semantics aside I’m on Hyprland, been using it for 6 months now and absolutely love it
XFCE4. It's intuitive and predictable without sacrificing the ability to customize it exactly the way I want (with Chicago95 ofc). The built-in panel widgets are nothing short of amazing: battery, CPU, RAM, network, and disk monitors with labels toggled off to save space and a clock with only what I need on one line: MM/DD HH:mm:ss
Enough features so that it "just works" (no nitpicking through config files), especially on laptops, without being bloated in any way. Bonus of its lightweight nature is that I can keep my Debian/XFCE setup consistent across all of my machines, both old and new.
Can't wait for the finished xfwm4 port to wayland so I don't have to sacrifice some security running X11 and so I can do fractional scaling on hidpi machines.
XFCE.
I recently switched to it after a year or so with KDE. Deff see some improvement in terms of battery life with my laptop, but I'm still not used to the lack of WinKey+Num shortcuts (I'm aware of docklike, but I need labels for open windows).
Winkey on linux is called superkey you can configure it to do what you want in settings.
OK so I have used several DEs but right now I'm on Plasma 6 because frankly, it's the best out there. It's easy to use, customizable, intuitive and looks nice. Is it on the heavier side? Yes, but that's okay. Also it helps that I have learnt the keyboard shortcuts on this.
I have used XFCE, Mate and Cinnamon in the past. If KDE somehow vanished off the face of the planet, I would likely switch to XFCE because it's light, customizable and fully functional.
Gnome, be it PC or Laptop. It just remains out of my way with it's minimalism. Tried KDE for a while, and I seriously can't stand it, personally.
xfce, i dont need that other bloat.
GNOME
Oh yeah I heard of trisquel, those gnu endorsed distros.
Ha, had no idea it was pronounced like that. I've always said MATE like "date"/"rate"/"fate"
You probably didn't even know it's pronounced Jimp too!!
/s