The next laptop I bought came preinstalled with Windows Vista (AKA Windows Millenium version 2). It was so frustrating I decided to investigate alternatives. I even considered going Macintosh. But I was at a bookstore and saw one of those Linux magazines with a free disc from which I could install Linux. I think it was Ubuntu on the disc (before Unity). I was hooked. I use Trisquel now.

Pop now uses cosmic

Still waiting for XFCE‘s Wayland support. Until then Plasma it is

I miss being on XFCE, I'll be so quick to go back when their wayland transition is done

After using Hyprland for 2 years I can say it's my favorite am by far for fun and productivity, however it's not stable at all

Same, and the OS is Ubuntu for me. I use my computer to get stuff done, not for distrohopping (though that's also a perfectly valid usecase if you find it fun 👍)

I've found hyprland itself is very stable, but what you run on top of it often compromises that. Using end 4 dots as a base on cachy has been a superb experience for me. Had a lot of issues with my completely custom hypr on tumbleweed (not tumbleweed's fault tho)

Booooo Wayland

I went from Gnome 2 to Mate, and switched to Plasma last year. Can't see myself moving away anytime soon XD

Try danklinux.com for an easy Niri install. Thank me later.

KDE has tiling.

i have tried kde and i cannot understand how so many people love it and hate gnome

No kink shaming! Bsdm is a valid way of life! (Or so I wa told)

KDE's absolutely excellent, but if you need every little kilobyte RAM, go Sway. Sway—It's Technically Graphical ™

Yeah. I was also at Ubuntu after couple years of distro hopping, until they made a change I didn't like so I just hopped to Debian and been there past 3 releases

I'm now on KDE. Before I have used XFCE, Gnome, Mate and Cinnamon.

People seem excited about Cosmic.

What does it make it so promising?

Me either. I use Plasma because I prefer the whole workflow but I’m fine with GNOME, it’s just a bit shit out of the box, which I think is part of the problem. It feels so much more modern and the settings menu is much better, plus all the GNOME apps feel lightyears ahead of the half-baked KDE stuff. I wish KDE would stop adding obscure features nobody uses and just work on the polish (though I think they’re doing a bit of that now with the new login screen and unified theming).

No, the main bar can be only on one screen

I'm not sure, it is been a while when I tried last time, but I remember I could not do it. I believe I asked on the kde forums as well, eventually I just classed it as something not possible in plasma and stopped trying to fix it.

cannot recommend pop with their new cosmic DE, it's quite bad. looks nice at first, but the more you dive in, the more it lacks basic stuff and you start noticing soo many little bugs and annoyances. had it on my laptop for a while, eventually just installed gnome. it started crashing frequently and suddenly i could no longer start steam, so i just installed ultramarine since it has been playing nice on my desktop. and it has just worked since.

I have only really used xfce. It's still fun to install Kali on devices but really I use xfce.

Just a user though, not a pro

I don't have a second screen right now, but here is my desktop with the 3 default task widgets. Only icons on top, switcher to the right, text and icons on the bottom. All in their own panels.
Of course any panel could just be moved onto a second monitor. I remember this is possible since KDE 4 and stable since early KDE 5.

KDE's strength is its incredibly customizability. In the past this also lead to instability for unorthodox configurations, but the last few years it has also been very stable for me.

Been on Awesome WM since '08, but once dappled with KDE. Does it still have resource hungry processes that I have no use for (IIRC, Akonadi or daemons related to it were one of those problematic components)?

It does, but they are removable (and I think there is an option to just install the base KDE package by itself rather than the bundles)

Cinnamon situation currently on arch feels such that it might break at any time, and in fact has recently. :-( I have absolutely loved the simplicity of this DE, but the breakages lately are worrisome. I'm considering migrating from cinnamon to plasma, but the added cruft that comes with the Plasma DE does not impress me. There is some tension; I have contributed to KDE projects, and I prefer KDE apps over gnome/GTK.

How well does plasma wayland tolerate unresponsive apps? I need to be able to keep graphical apps in this state for possibly an hour at time, as I run them under a debugger.

true, like cinnamon is perfect on mint, but for example fedora cinnamon feels very wrong. it's been a while since i tried it, but it definitely wasn't as stable, and i had to change a lot of stuff from dconf editor, like for example the location bar in the file manager always defaulted to text mode even if you switched it to link mode

It's the heaviest.

Wait. It is like hyperland but with a control panel so you dont really miss anything like changing control mouse speed screen resolution etc.

This looks interesting. Today i use plasma and kanata to get a good environment that is close to tiling

I've enjoyed KDE since Mandrake 6. The control you get to have as a user is amazing. Thought to be honest, I really change very little. But the Cube! I will die for that Cube.

But I have used probably every DE that runs on Linux one time or another. Each has its own charms and quirks. While my laptop lives comfortably with Fedora 43 Kinonite, the cheap mini desktop I'm using right now currently has COSMIC on it. And to be honest, as much as I like LXDE, dnfdragoria as it's package manager, someone at Fedora needs to take dnfdragoria out back and launch it into the sun. COMIC is far lighter feeling than I thought would be. I will live with it for a while I think.

I think due to Cinnamon being the DE for Mint, they might be feeling some issues with their transition to Wayland. I know I switched from Fedora Cinnamon to Fedora Budgie for a bit because things got frustrating when they started the switch. I'm using Fedora COMIC right now. It seems pretty decent.

What's the difference between plasma and neon

I just installed the Fedora spin with COSMIC this week. It's running very nicely on a low powered mini-desktop with 8Gbit of shared memory. It feels light enough and easy enough to use for newcomers to Linux. Plus it has just enough eye candy to satisfy those that want some customization by just point and clicking.

I'm going to be trying it out for a while I think. But my laptop will always be Kinonite.

Plasma is great. But it's missing an important feature. Apps, such as backup or sync, cannot navigate to network shares, to use as a backup target. Dolphin sees the shares ok, but its important to backup. Windows lets apps select network targets. Plasma should too.

It's not that I "hate" Gnome, I still love Gnome 2 and Cinnamon by extension, but the workflow of Gnome 3 just sucks balls for me. I can tolerate the workflow of any other DE, but Gnome 3 is just right out.

Get over it. We all have to.

I use Nixos, but my ssh mount and nfs and samba mount can be selected as backup path for kup.

I just install the Fedora spin of COSMIC. So far, I have to say that I'm impressed by it. It's pretty lightweight and nimble on low-end hardware while still having just enough customizing to be satisfying. The DE is also pretty easy and simple to use. It also appears to be very stable and tolerant during use.

If you got time, I would tell you to just try it. It has quickly gone from "I'm not very sure about this choice." to "Hey, I kinda like this."

Do it. You know you want to...

I mean, everyone liked XP and most everyone tried to keep using it years after Microsoft wanted us to stop. Everyone hated vista.

But modern gnome is excellent. My joke was trying to point out that hating it while liking the old version seems like a uniquely old man thing to do, just hating change for being change

Nice. Kup actually lets me see the Network. But then complains if I select a samba share. There is a popular bug report about this.
I prefer sync backup to access documents directly, instead of kups scrambled backup files.

while liking the old version seems like a uniquely old man thing to do, just hating change for being change

Gnome 3 was a huge paradigm shift. Most people who noped out of Gnome afterwards disliked very specific things about it, not just hating change for being change. This is a really dismissive and kind of insulting take.

All I know is those older forks look like 1998.

I'm waiting for Cosmic to mature

@orlyowl @TrickDacy for me it was entire session crash on compositor crash. And gnome is still keeping this very useful feature, but making this crash even stronger with wayland

It has so many great ideas, all it needs is time and polish.

neon is the full kde distribution i guess, you can install standalone as its own os. plasma is just the desktop manager shell, can possibly be installed on top of other distributions. (im probably not using the correct terms.)

What do you use for backup?

Kup currently also does not satisfy my needs, but I am not sure what else I should use.

Dolphin shows you places that are not in your file system, such as network shares or your phone‘s media directory. Those are fake files, illusions of Satan, temptations designed to stray you from the path of God. Avoid anything that is not opened with open and not read with read system calls, for doing so is a sin before eyes of God (fopen and fread are permitted). Mount your network shares using sudo mount -t cifs.

Gnome 3 abruptly removed app icons from the desktop moved taskbar to the top of the screen, and broke Alt-Tab. That’s why prople hate Gnome and love KDE, because KDE did not break these features.

Gnome 3 got rid of desktop icons and the menu of Gnome 2, it was also a resource hog. Mate offers what I liked about Gnome 2. Sue me.