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Seeking info on all of the many, lesser known desktop environments (self.linux)

submitted 1 year ago by borzthewolf to c/[email protected]

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So I am an aesthetics guy when it comes to my distro and desktop environment. I like things to look clean and visually appealing. Last night I kinda took a deep dive into the world of different DE's. Of course there's the popular ones that everybody knows about i.e. Cinnamon, Xfce, KDE, Mate, Gnome, etc., however there's a whole other world of random desktops that I was never aware of! Also it's difficult to find a clear list of all the available environments.

Basically, how the heck do I find out more about DE's and which distro they are compatable with. Of course I always check the distros site, but they usually list the big ones and often times will say "plus others"... how can I find out which desktops are available for which distros? I've find it rather tricky to figure out.

Another thing that kinda tripped me out is that it seems not all DE's such as the popular ones I listed, appear to be the same visually. For instance, XeroLinux is very beautiful to me and from what I've gathered, it runs KDE Plasma. Imo it looks nothing like the actual KDE Plasma OS... are there like different versions of Gnome, KDE, Mate, etc. that look different than others? To me, I figure they would and should all look the same. Idk, it's all a bit confusing to me and I hope you kind folks could shed some light. Thank you

I should mention that I have zero interest in the window manager or tiler or whatever they are called. To me, they are super ugly and very confusing to understand :)

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (20 children)

Okay. There's a difference between a Desktop Environment and a Window Manager. There are lots of Window Managers, but not that many DEs. Ive played around with a lot of them, and I thought I'd share my thoughts:

Gnome my #1 since 3 hit, this is my home and where I always end up. It might be lacking in configuration options, but it's got a great look, coherent design, and a default workflow that feels like it was designed specifically for me.
KDE Plasma Desktop is massively configurable, to an almost shocking degree. There's very little you can't do with Plasma. It's perhaps a bit less stable than Gnome, and you can break it depending on your settings choices, but holy crow, it's amazing.
XFCE is my go to for older computers. It's light, fast, and has a lot of configuration options. You can get it looking pretty cool with some work. It's missing some of the fancier features, and development is slow, but that's by design. It's super stable. I kind of think of it as the Debian of DEs.
LXQT even lighter than XFCE, but based on QT rather than GTK3. It's fine, but I think the GUI tools are kinda ugly.
Cinnamon was originally a Gnome 3 fork. It's fine I guess, if you want your desktop to use the Windows workflow. Nemo is an excellent file manager, and there are a lot of fun ways to configure the look, but I just don't care for it.
Pantheon is the official DE of elementary OS. It's pretty in a Apple sort of way, but it's tools felt a little dated and the theming outside of the official elementary apps was inconsistent at best. It want to like it, but it feels incomplete.
Deepin has a similar problem - it's own apps look great, other apps look like they're from another planet. It's got a really nice look, though, and a good kinda feel to it.
CDE the Common Desktop Environment. I tried it as a goof. It's... well, let's say it's nostalgic. It's been around for 30 years, and started out as a Unix desktop. It still looks pretty close to where it started, but it's up to date (the last stable release was like October last year I think). It's zippy of you can put up with the designed-for-EGA color palette, but really only good for a lark.

Hopping around to different DEs can be fun, but at the end of the day, the trick is to find one that has a workflow that works for you, or use KDE and make the workflow you need.

ETA: Somehow, I forgot to mention Mate. Basically, it's an updated version of Gnome 2, which, to me, is an uglier and more awkward to configure XFCE. It's not for me, but a lot of folks really love it. It's so cool that we have a choice, and can be different!

[–] borzthewolf 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Thanks a lot!!! And any and tweaks to the environments can be done simply with the distros tools and settings or is there more to configuring appearance than that? Just because as I noticed. Two different distros could have a gnome desktop but look vastly different, sometimes almost like completely different desktops. Thats the part I dont quite understand.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Well, if you want to know what Gnome is supposed to look like (I mean the "default" setup) check out Fedora Workstation. Anything that looks different from that is modified. Several other Distros ship with a default Gnome desktop as well - OpenSuse Tumbleweed/Leap, Arch's default setup, Vanilla OS, et al.

Gnome is actually one of the more difficult to modify. By default, there's light mode, dark mode, and... that's it. However, you can make some pretty radical changes with extensions and user themes. While it's fairly easy to add extensions, user themes take a bit more more work to get going, and require some knowledge of CSS to make.

Does that answer your question?

[–] borzthewolf 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes it does, thank you. So if the desktop is "officially" supported by a distro, they should all relatively look the same?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not exactly. The Distros can make lots of changes. Ubuntu officially supports Gnome, but has a bunch of preinstalled extensions and settings tweaks that change the look and feel.

If you want to know the "official" look of Gnome, as I said, check out Fedora. By default, I'm pretty sure the only enabled plugin puts the Fedora name in the bottom right corner.

In fact, if you want to know what the most plain, standard setup for any major DE is, check Fedora's spin: Fedora KDE, XFCE, LXDE, and so on all start very vanilla on Fedora.

[–] borzthewolf 2 points 1 year ago

Ahh ok so this is basically my point. I've done a lot of distro hopping and noticed some distros GNOME or KDE or whatever, desktops look way different from other distros using the same desktop. I have no clue what goes into such customization and I'd rather not install a lesser know, possibly unstable distro just because of their specific spin of a DE, ya know? I suppose I need to learn more about customizing environments myself, but don't know where to begin, other than the obvious built in settings you can tweak

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