I’ve dabbled with Linux over the years, first with Ubuntu in the early 2010s, then Elementary OS when that dropped, and a few years ago I really enjoyed how customizable the gui was with Xubuntu. I was able to make it look just like WIndows 2000 which was really cool.
Which current distro has the best GUI, in your opinion? I find modern Ubuntu to feel a little basic and cheap. I guess I don’t really like modern Gnome. I’m currently using Windows 10 LTSC which is probably the best possible version of Windows, but I’d jump to linux if I could find a distro with a gui that feels at least as polished and feature rich as Windows 10 LTSC.
Distro is irrelevant. DE/WM choice is all that matters as far as GUI goes. Also, if you want a GUI that looks or feels like windows then KDE probably has you covered in that you could probably customise it to mimic windows.
I quite like the Desktop Environment in elementaryOS. I think it’s called Pantheon Desktop? It’s very polished. Or InstantWM from InstantOS is also interesting and has some nice animations and effects.
Personally, I use simple and minimal Openbox
Yes, exactly. haha, the distro has nothing to do with the GUI. That’s your Desktop Environment. On almost every single popular distro you can get teh same DE’s either through official offerings or community versions.
deleted by creator
I also enjoy Mint. Simple and easy to use. I wouldn’t consider myself old, so I think you shouldn’t either!
deleted by creator
Absolutely nothing wrong with that. Speaking of which I’m starting to feel comfortable enough suggesting Linux as an OS for folks looking for a PC. It’s nice, because it really brings old PCs to life. If say my older parent wanted a computer I could buy a decent used one and just slap Mint on there and it would suit their needs.
deleted by creator
Same, tho I don’t think I qualify as “old” quite yet
The real question is what Window Manager has the best GUI… you can run any window manager on any distro - it just takes a little work.
If you’re talking about out-of-the-box without any user customization, I’ll make a couple suggestions that I think work for new Linux users - not that I’m saying you’re green, but most power users know they can fully design the OS from the ground up if needed.
PopOS - In between - GNOME-like with some PopOS customizations under the hood.
ElementaryOS - MacOS-like WM thats clean fresh and easy to understand
Mint - Cinnamon DM, Windows-like with some customization possible
As a caveat to this, System76 is working a brand-new DE that they’re writing from scratch in Rust called COSMIC Desktop, so they might become less GNOME-like fairly soon. Although presumably you’ll still be able to install GNOME on it if you really want to.
System76/PopOS always bringing the noise!!
Pop is is great. The tiling is so easy. There’s very little learning curve.
I’m using Fedora with GNOME now and enjoying it. If you want a more Windows-like experience, go with Fedora KDE spin.
I use Garuda dragonized with kde plasma as my set up, works for me!
Although KDE is windows like out of the box, it is really customizable without the need of addons, which I like. The Gnome addons can be really cool, but in my experience they can make the desktop less stable and often get abandoned.
This can’t be understated, when I started using linux it was on gnome and everything worked great, I installed plugins and it still worked fine at first but then everything started breaking
I’ve heard people complain about KDE stability but as far as I can tell they are old complaints that aren’t relevant anymore, becouse while for me things kept breaking after I used plugins on gnome, on KDE I customized the hell out of it and then almost a year later, and several major updates, and still no issues
I don’t see why distros should be married to a specific GUIs. Any distro can support any number of GUIs. It just seems like a huge waste of effort to make a distro just to support one GUI.
I would encourage people who want to implement their unique vision for a GUI to make their effort easily packagable by any distro and to work with an existing community distro to make their work available widely.
deleted by creator
I couldn’t agree more. I think that tying yourself to a specific distribution is a good way to keep yourself in a box. I think the better question here is “What DE do you prefer?” and then choose your distro based on your preferences for desktop environments while keeping other things in mind (i.e. frozen packages or rolling base).
I, like yourself, pretty much require KDE to be functional on my desktop. A great distro for me is one that ships new KDE releases without much delay (or at least, one that’s not completely unreasonable) without having to wait for the next LTS release to get all the goodies. This narrows down the choices pretty substantially as there aren’t a lot of distros that meet this spec:
- Arch
- Tumbleweed
- Fedora
- NixOS (debatable on the keeping KDE up-to-date iirc)
- KDE Neon
- Ubuntu with PPAs (least favourite way to stay up to date though)
I prefer to have a rolling (or close to rolling base) so that really only leaves me with the top 3 options.
I’m not really here to shill for KDE, but just encourage folks to find the DE that feels most comfortable to them and then work on your requirements from there.
I would wait for the release of plasma 6 before you bother switching though, if you’re already comfy!
@Communist Cool, yeah I just remembered hearing a bit about that on @thelinuxexperiment Actually, thinking about it - I’m currently using Pop!_OS as my daily driver and @system76 have been working on Cosmic DE which looks pretty interesting!
i3, and swaywm , I have used almost … All Linux/BSD/Windows/Osx/Unix Desktop Environments. I really like #enlightenment but it can be pretty buggy especially on wayland.
I’m currently quite happy with i3, but would really like to check out Wayland.
currently the support for barrier/synergy (controlling multiple computers with one keyboard/mouse) seems to be not there - although I saw something about a workaround with the newest synergy version.
would you be so kind to give me some other reasons to hold back?
Anything else that sucks in the new world?I have never used Synergy , but with sway which is built on top of wayland. I can use multiple monitors and it works great for me. I don’t really have a need for multiple computers since I use libvirtd (VirtualManager) and host multiple OS’s and share directories between different systems.
multiple monitors is sadly different than multiple computers, side by side
thanks for the input, maybe I’ll use a test system first :-)
Feodora and Debian have a GNOME experience that has not been ruined to make less innovative in favor of making the UX more similar (and therefore familiar) to that of the worst desktop operating system available (windows).
If you’ve seen but never really used GNOME in a daily workflow it looks and feels alien. Thats becausethey devs are trying to make something that is friendly to the people who actually use it and intuitive to the people who are new to desktop computing, and they are making no attemt to appease thoes who believe that it is impossible to do better than Microsoft has with Windows.
If you’ve never really used it (and have used ms windows), Vanilla GNOME is alien to you. If you have really used it, nothing else is yet on its level.
I switched from fvwm2 with heavy customizing over to gnome3 years ago.
I love that UX. Use it all day. Private and on my work-computer.
Any distro where I can easily replace the default with sway.
Sway is awesome! Recently started using it, and being able to customize literally everything with simple CSS gives you so much control. Though it is a bit of a double edged sword, as if I don’t catch myself I’ll never stop tuning it.
Imo, I really like linux mint’s cinnamon, its so clean and pretty.
You can change the DE (desktop environment) as you like but I really like Budgie from Solus. My daily driver is Plasma and find myself on openSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s by far the most crash-free and freeze-free experience I’ve had while using Plasma. Note: Installing Nvidia Drivers is at your own risk, though.
Same here, I’ve been using Budgie for a couple years and it’s awesome!
I like to use good ol’ stable Debian with i3-gaps as a window manager.
Linux Mint Cinnamon. Stable, yet tons of customizations possible and makes the jump from Windows a whole lot easier (I jumped 1.5 years ago and will never look back).
+1 for Linux Mint Cinnamon. It just works
I dislike Cinnamon because it doesn’t “just work” if you have multiple monitors like I do.
Apps don’t sync properly on the taskbar across both of them. The only way to get them to sync properly is to disable the grouped taskbar. People have mentioned this to the Cinnamon devs for years now, and they don’t appear to use multiple monitors so they don’t care.
KDE Plasma works great with multiple monitors and has been 100% an upgrade over Cinnamon. Plus there’s more third-party support for Plasma than there is Cinnamon.
I also use multiple moniters with LM Cinnamon and they work just fine, but I am sorry to hear it doesn’t work on your machine! KDE doesn’t do it for me aesthetically nor resource-wise, especially on low/mid power laptops while Cinnamon does (although normally I would go for XFCE on low spec hardware). Thankfully we both have the option to choose :)
i really like gnome, especially with extensions like dash to dock, transparent top bar, etc. really nice, simple, and clean ui imo.
Gnome with pop’s cosmic extensions is great. Excited to try their rust based replacement once it’s ready
Yup, I tend to recommend fedora to my newbie friends because Gnome is simple to switch to and works really well.
I’m using GNOME on Fedora rn and it’s bussin
deleted by creator
@WingedSeven Fedora is pretty much the go-to distro for vanilla GNOME. There’s something really enjoyable about distros that just give the DE as-is instead of trying to turn it into something different.
Same. Pretty much the perfect setup for laptop usage. I just use a couple of extensions like Just Perfection to tailor it a bit more, like removing the top bar which I personally don’t find useful when I have trackpad gestures and keyboard shortcuts.
