>>13331 I like the "traditional but polished" style of Cinnamon. Can't stand anything with headerbars and hamburger menus.

I have Mint and I use the Cinnamon DE. It's okay, the applets makes it crash from tie to time, but it's stable enough to me. I also tried Plasma on Debian for a while since the default layout makes it look like Window 7, but couldn't get into it. I think it has way too customization for my taste. >Gnome Haven't tried it yet, but from what I've seen looks like something for mobile or touch screens. I would like to tried it out on a hybrid laptop someday.

I absolutely hate how windowsy kde looks. Its just awful how they completely abandon their sense of beauty for "functionality". Imagine packing 100 fucking buttons under some menues bcs its useful. Imagine adding games and other bloat to the default kde package. Imagine also making it as ugly as possible. Thats kde. I currently use gnome and am quite content with it after some customizastion to add a taskbar at the bottom and changing the icons. I dont like how slow nautilus is so I switched to the lf file manager on kitty and am content thus far. On my laptop I am trying out hyprland bcs Ive been told that tiling wm are more efficient bcs you further reduce you reliance on your mouse and you can use the space more efficiently. So far I have had to configure quite a lot to add a taskbar at the top, night light, notifications its quite astounding how much work the big DEs take away from you. I think its using less ram so I will keep it for know there but I think its a little less convinient with multiple screens as you have to keep better track of you workspaces. One big large screen would be good for tiling managers...

I just use ubuntu's desktop

>>13538 Gnomes fine but the apt package manager is really annoying to deal with because all the packages are out of date and broken or dont even exist on there.

>>13557 Yeah, I tried to install Node and it had the 12 version when the lastest is the 20. It's so fucking out of date.

I just use dwm because outside of 2 niche use cases it does every I need out of the box. I did spend some time patching some extra features but mainly it was just to have a different layout for each tag so it wouldn't be resizing every application when I changed something, as well as systray functionality for dumb applications that demand a systray to store their icon, which frankly none of the applications add any benefit to having a systray icon, I've never once had to click on the dumb things for any reason.

>>13331 For me, the only usable Desktop Environment is Xfce4 (and perhaps Mate). I use Ratpoison on my laptop and IceWM on my desktop (I have also tested LabWC). Ratpoison is manually tiling WM. It's basically Tmux but for managing GUI windows. By default all windows are maximized and you can use ctrl-t n to switch to another ("next") window or you can use ctrl+t 2 to switch to window number 2 (and so on). There is also a command for switching to a window by searching for it's title, but I forgot the keybinding... The great thing is that Ratpoison can show all keybinding with ctrl+t ? (it lists even custom ones!). ctrl+t is the default Ratpoison "prefix key". All Ratpoison commands start with the prefix key but you can change the prefix key if you want, and you can define keybindings that don't need the prefix key (like making WinLogo + r execute your program launcher). Ratpoison is very simple to use and configure but some people want that their WM manages windows in a more dynamic or automatic way. It's also extremely lightweight. IceWM is basically a clone of Windows 95 GUI with additional features (like optional support for sloppy focus). I used to use OpenBox but the development of it has stalled, unfortunately. Both OpenBox and IceWM are very simple to configure, too. LabWC is a clone of OpenBox for Wayland. >>13343 >Gnome >Haven't tried it yet, but from what I've seen looks like something for mobile or touch screens. Gnome 2 was great but Gnome 3 is basically the Windows 8 of Linux world. Avoid. Mate desktop environment is a clone of Gnome 2. >>13557 You should try Debian testing. >apt package manager is really annoying to deal with APT is actually fine. The only problem is that making packages for APT (or Yum/DNF) is too hard.