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 :)
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!
I’ll add Trinity to the list. It started as a fork of KDE 3.5.
I haven’t tried Trinity, mostly because KDE 3 was a bad experience for me. It’s certainly an interesting project, though.
I tried it on my play-puter and while it was certainly nostalgic, it wasn’t enough to make me switch from Plasma.
I use Trinity as a daily driver, although I may be the only person on Lemmy who does. My Unixporn post
TDE has packages for (as far as I know) all major distros, although only two very minor ones (Q4OS and ExeGnuLinux) use it as the default DE. It is very much a traditional desktop environment designed for a keyboard+mouse setup, so if you have a touchscreen, it may not be for you.
That link definitely doesn’t go to unixporn for me.
Someone forgot to put the unix in the porn.
I have checked out screenshots of trinity and to me it looks sorta dated and weird… Unless you know of a distro that has a pretty version? Lol it is a different feel for sure
Also Budgie!
I have nothing against Budgie, I just haven’t used it. It looks pretty nice, though 😀
I don’t use Budgie either, just adding to this excellent and very detailed list of DEs.
The thing about budgie I’ve noticed from screenshots is that the environment looks vastly different on each distro that supports it. IMO solus looks way best, but at the moment solus is up in the sir lol
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.
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?
Yes it does, thank you. So if the desktop is “officially” supported by a distro, they should all relatively look the same?
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.
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
There’s also NsCDE, the modern version of CDE
An updated CDE? Well I’ll be truing that out for certain!
Never heard of this, I’ll have to look into it and cde for that matter
NsCDE is my desktop on Slackware, Slint, Void, and OpenBSD. I guess I’m most comfortable with it.
Also it’s difficult to find a clear list of all the available environments.
how the heck do I find out more about DE’s and which distro they are compatable with.
All DEs can be run on all mainstream distros.
appear to be the same visually.
It’s just the default theme + icon packs. You can configure any DE to looks very similar as other DE, if you use the same icon pack + themes + wallpapers.
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 :)
Spoiler: all DEs using a window manager, so all DEs are super ugly for you…
Lol its clear that I know nothing beyond the DE . so basically do you choose your de based upon what the display manager supports?
Fluxbox is simple, flexible, fast, and beautiful. I’ve been running fluxbox/debian for like 20 years and couldn’t be happier.
I need to check this out, thanks. Is it a de or just like a window manager?
I always bounce between fluxbox, plasma, and gnome. There was also another one I liked but it was a pain to configure from scratch and it was similar to fluxbox but I forgot the name. Everything is keyboard shortcuts and it’s a tiling manager.
Openbox? IceWM? i3?
Like, idk what you’re supposed to do with these though?
Do stuff?
The DEs listed for a distro will be ones you can get out of the box, i.e. you install the distro and it already has the DE. However, you can then install pretty much any DE/WM on pretty much any distro. Most of the time, you’ll also get a login screen where you can choose between different DEs, so you can try multiple on the same distro to see how you like them.
Most of the ‘random desktops’ will be window managers, there are just a few main DEs, which each have a window manager bundled in. If you take one of the separate window managers (which can be tiling, stacking, or a mix) you’ll just have a bit more work to do to make it like you want, but they can have more customisation than full DEs. You can make most window managers look like pretty much any DE, but not necessarily the other way around. If you look at [email protected], most of those are window managers. Saying they’re confusing to understand and you don’t want to have to customise them to make them look nice and add any separate programs you need for a full system is fair, but saying they’re ugly is kinda nonsensical, since you can make them look however you like.
As for why some distros’ Plasmas look different, that’s just because it is itself quite customisable (from what I hear, the most customisable of the mainstream DEs). So if you install XeroLinux, you could customise it to look like stock Plasma, and vice versa.
Long story short, don’t choose a distro based on their default DE or vice versa, don’t disregard window managers out of hand (but do if you just want a full out-of-the-box environment), and look at different distros’ customisations, as well as [email protected] and similar, to see what DEs can look like you want, but again you don’t have to decide distro based on that.
Wow lots of info here, thanks! See, I know nothing about window or tiling managers and not necessarily know if I need to go that deep, but maybe! So the two more random desktops I’m interested in are probably cutefish and deepin oh and paperde, but I cannot find that on any distro so it must not be maintained. Sorta the same deal with cutefish, though I know it actually IS available. DDE is one I’m on the fence about. Just the bad security issues I’ve always read has kept me from deepin, but figure the environment is safer? Lol and again, it looks vastly different on each distro.
Sooo basically two things I dont understand. You said you can get any DE on any distro,but thats not true ime. I’ve searched numerous distros repos or packages and some distros had DEs that others did not. Also, why does it seem like so many desktops vary so much in appearance. How do I know what each looks like on each distro? Because I’ve found a lot of variance and I dont know enough about the inner workings of DEs lol thanks man
If you want to time travel a bit, OpenWindows / OpenLook was very clean.
How clean? Literally nothing on the desktop.
Everything was accessed through an easily (re)configurable context menu.
By default there would have been absolute necessities on there but precious little else. It was up to the user to edit the config to add programs to it. Kind of like a forerunner of the Quick Launch toolbar or the Dock.
That said, I seem to recall it was possible to put launcher icons on the desktop too, although that is also where programs minimised to in icon form (Windows 3 used to do that too), so maybe I’m wrong about that.
I’m sorry, I should clarify, when I say clean I dont mean minimal, maybe sleek or stylish (but now gaudy) would have been better words
I temember when Slackware still included it. Used to recompile any apps that still supported the toolkit just to have a better look and feel. I miss OpenWindows.
Pretty much every window manager I’ve seen is highly configurable. You can find hundredths of ready themes or customize them yourself. Changing distros to get a nice desktop doesn’t make sense. Just install whatever you like and customize it. If you’re on a decent hardware just go with KDE or Gnome/Cinnamon/Mate. Default themes will vary but you get get to pretty much work/look the same. On a slower machine go with XFCE/Enlightement/Fluxbox or anything really. All or them will be configurable. Just look at some screenshots, find something you like and play around with it.
Hmm I need to research windows managers more. I know nothing about them lol
There’s also a lesser known Enlightenment-based Moksha desktop. From what I understand, they rolled their windows manager and a set of applications. The creators went all-in on eastern religion terminology. Try Bodhi linux to get full experience, even though I think the UI is quite a bit off and ugly.
I feel the same that it feels off and kinda ugly lol its different for sure, sorta like Bunsen labs, but just very strange and not necessarily appealing
Some decent lists on the Arch Wiki:
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Desktop_environment
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Window_manager
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wayland
The site Repology may help checking distro packages.
Check unixporn screenshots too.
Fantastic resources! Thank you
IceWM. Just the bare minimum I need. But nothing more.
I dont understand this at all. I mean I’ve heard of iceWM but know nothing about it. The screenshots I’ve seen, it looks super minimal, complex, any ugly, but I’m sure I’m missing so much info on how you can actually use it
