RetroFedRound two: DEs and Window Managers!
submitted by
Mistiy
Bottom left is Awesome WM. Ask me anything or tell us your picks!
(and feel free to tear me apart on my picks)
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What’s that at the top left? I can’t find a window manager named Cosmic anywhere. I’m addicted to hopping window managers, I’m curious what that one is like especially if it is tiling.
It’s a desktop environment, originally from Pop!_OS. It’s very new, and sometimes still slightly buggy but I really like it.
It’s a hybrid tiling or floating wm. The tiling mode is really good though!
https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-epoch
Favorite DE: Niri First DE used: XFCE DE you want to use in the future: Niri Honorable Mention: Hyprland least favorite: Anything non tiling, or maybe Hyprland due to a lot of minor annoyances Current DE: Niri longest used DE: i3 Current Distro: NixOS and Arch
You should try Niri!
I’ve considered it, but i’m not sure if I like the scrolling tiling yet..
At first its novelty, then it starts to make sense, and then you can’t live without it. I’ve tried to switch to other DE’s a couple of times including similar ones like MangoWC and I always come back. I used Cosmic for 30 mins before I ragequit and went back to Niri.
I tried Niri for a little more than a month and it is great I feel that regular tiling is better. Sure, the scrolling layout has the benefit of not having to resize windows as often, but at the cost of having to look/search for those windows that overflow the workspace view. Also Niri has a problem that when you toggle fullscreen on a window inside a column it will expel it out from the column. And I’m not a fan of the dynamic workspaces amongst some other little quirks too. I have a blog post about it if you are interested.
Nonetheless it is a great window manager and it is in my top 3.
Niri’s workspaces are just rows, windows being expelled from the columns when fullscreened is very much expected.
I suppose what you want is floating the window and making it fullscreen, returning it to it’s position in the layout after returning it to it’s normal size?
To be honest, sounds like a bit of pain to implement.
I want to fullscreen a window that is contained within a column and when I toggle out of the fullscreen the window must not be expelled out of the column(staying in place). For example in Hyprland’s scrolling layout windows that are fullscreen keep are kept in the column (it looks clunky as hell).
I talked to Niri’s developer long time ago on Matrix and he agreed on that, however this behaviour (or apparent behaviour) is not the same with tabbed windows withing a column. I understand that within the windowing logic it is hard thing to do, and that they are not the same operations.
For what is worth, I’m not the only one with this problem, many people have expressed the same thought.
Well, it’s because the whole column is fullscreened instead of a single window in that case. I guess you can abuse it a little bit and write a script that’d switch the column into tabbed mode before fullscreening a window if the column has more than one window in it.
I don’t think there is a way to know if the column is already tabbed, though. Might need a bit of unholy incantations to make it all work.
Niri is crazy good. I get itchy without it now
niri and dank material shell 🙏👌
Fellow nix os enjoyer ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
What’s your beef with Gnome?
For me, it’s “use it the dev way or no way at all” mentality baked in.
If you like the GNOME way of doing things, you’ll feel great. If you don’t like any aspect of it, it will be very hard to rectify.
Interesting that you had similar experience with KDE, because mine is on the contrary. Whatever I could envision, it could be made with KDE - even the stock one. Essentially, you can even recreate much of GNOME experience within it, if you so prefer.
There is a whole extensions library for Gnome for customization.
Sure. But they are still more limited in scope in my experience, not to mention security concerns and other problems.
How is that different than KDE? You can recreate the KDE stock layout in Gnome too.
Basic layout - maybe, but barely the experience.
KDE allows you to turn your system into anything you want without ever touching a single config, and this goes immeasurably beyond a basic layout. It all comes out of the box, too. I only faced GNOME after experiencing KDE, and it felt so heavily like walls and walls and walls everywhere.
Now, I’m not saying GNOME is bad, and this is not a fanboy contest. But customizability of all things is clearly a win on KDE’s side.
The point of Gnome is that you can’t do those things without extensions. It makes it way harder for grandma to fuck something up. But you can still do them. On the other hand I have found things that are easy to customize in Gnome with extensions, like laptop trackpad gestures, that are nonexistent in KDE with or without extensions as far as I can tell.
But like I said before, to each their own. We are just talking about two different approaches to the same solution. I often recommend KDE to people who are coming over from Windows, but after over 25 years of trying different ones I keep going back to Gnome personally. The only major exception was when Gnome 3 came out I spent several years on Mate (a fork of Gnome 2).
idk.. it just feels very locked down, and honestly every time i’ve tried it, there’s been some issue with it. I feel like it’s not customizable enough for me, and also the themeing is inconsistent.
That’s honestly exactly how I would describe KDE, but to each their own!
you would describe KDE as.. not customizable?
Inconsistent
And I had that same reaction when you said Gnome wasn’t customizable.
Probably never found the widget store.
Maybe OP likes a more Windows-like UI
That’s not really my issue. I actually prefer MacOS like-interfaces, although in the grand scheme of things I don’t actually care. I mostly just want to be able to choose what I want though.
People talk about how gnome is the obvious choice for people coming from a Mac, but, well, I came from a Mac and I hated gnome. It wasn’t Mac-like at all, it just felt oddly locked-down, with loads of wasted space. The suggestion that Mac users would like it tells me that those people have never actually used a Mac.
Meanwhile, I can quite easily make Plasma look like macOS if I wanted to.
Has anyone cracked the launcher bar in Plasma 6 since Latte Dock didn’t make the jump?
What do you mean?
Latte Dock isn’t being maintained any more, right?
It was the only one I could find that replicated the MacOS dock aesthetic and behavior and it’s used in all the drop-in global themes, but it’s doesn’t run on Plasma 6.
Both my favorite, longest used and current DE would be MATE. Currently using it on desktop with Debian and a laptop running Fedora. Super customizable and very speedy. Beyond that I really enjoy Gnome but haven’t used it in a bit.
Niri + dank material shell over here. I absolutely love the infinite horizontal desktop
Niri is interesting, but made my mouse go crazy.
Favorite: Cinnamon.
Honorable Mention: KDE.
Least Favorite: Gnome.
First: Gnome.
Current: Cinnamon.
Longest Used: KDE.
Future: Cinnamon
What’s the DE you want to use in the future? I’m not great with logos. Thanks 😊
https://awesomewm.org
Thanks so much!
Huh, developing a new DE for X11 is… A choice.
It’s not a new environment, it’s been around for donkeys’ years
Favorite: KDE. The GOAT babyyy
Least Favorite: Deepin, due to the privacy concerns
First DE: XFCE
Honorable Mention: Cosmic. It is sexy with decent balance of customization & strong unified vision. It is early on though so not quite ready for prime time. Some bugs, and resource consumption could be better.
Current DE: KDE
Potential Future DE: Might see what thr fuss is about with WMs like Niri. It seems more complicated to set up than it needs to be, but I like the tiling and use of desktops sort of like GNOME but better.
Longest used DE: KDE
Current distro: Fedora KDE
Gotta say, I don’t really think there’s any big issues with Cosmic anymore. They are updating very very quickly, and at this point is consumes less resources than XFCE….
It also has a native tiling mode xD
i tried cosmic on nixos a while back and it was a bit clunky and missing a couple of bits
time to change that couple of lines of config and try again
i use gnome btw :)
I totally understand people who like Gnome, don’t get me wrong, it’s just not for me.
Since i’m on a rolling release, I thankfully always have the newest versions of Cosmic. They recently also added blurring effects, so that’s pretty fun. Hope it works better for you now!
That’s good to hear! I tried it earlier this year and it was responsive and all (when not buggy) but sitting at 3 or 4 GB of RAM idle. I might give it another go.
I think mine sits at like 1.5 GB idle these days. They’ve really come a long way
Favorite: KDE.
Least Favorite: Gnome, but I’ve not tried a ton… It’s slick but way too opinionated for my tastes. I could change most of what bothers me about it with add-ons and mods, but KDE gives me the controls I want out of the box, and lets you do damned near anything you want before you even start installing mods (I don’t understand the person who thinks it’s too limited and Gnome is more flexible, but different priorities, I guess)
First DE: KDE on XanderOS… To be fair, the name sounded cool to young me and I didn’t know much of anything about the different Linux distros yet. And I think Ubuntu either wasn’t around yet or hadn’t gotten well enough known for me to have spotted it initially
Honorable Mention: Unity… Love it or hate it, Ubuntu was trying something actually interesting and I think it’s a shame they didn’t stick with it longer
Current DE: KDE
Potential Future DE: not sure, KDE does everything I want at this time, but I might give Cosmic a try, and/or a tiling WM, though I suspect I won’t care for it (I’ll give it a real shot to convince me, I just don’t see the appeal)
Longest used DE: KDE
Current distro: Mint with KDE shoehorned in, though will be OpenSuSE Tumbleweed in a couple hours (I love Mint but I’m tired of fighting with old packages and drivers, and suspect that might be the cause of graphics stack crashes that have plagued me… Also because I’m tired of waiting for KDE 6 for years now and it’ll be probably mid next year still before it’s available on Mint, and even then still only as an afterthought)
I’m a Unity denier since childbirth. In hindsight it feels like Apple lite.
POP! Os pulls it off pretty well I think.
First: Gnome Favorite: Gnome Longest Used: Gnome Least Favorite: KDE Current: Gnome Future: Gnome
Used Cinnamon, KDE, XFCE in the past. Bucking the trend, I think Gnome is fine and does what I need it to do. You do you, though. That’s what is great about Linux.
Gnome + Wayland + NVIDIA drivers = Not a good time.
Gnome was fine, gnome today is unusable.
What sort of issues do you run into with GNOME w/ Nvidia? I’m curious because it has been rock solid for me with 5070ti on a laptop.
The most maddening behavior with alt tab. Let’s say I have 4 windows open on a single desktop split on a single monitor. [A|B] and [C|D]. C and D become best buddies, if I alt tab from A to D to reference something, A loses focus and I get both C and D visible. It becomes impossible to look at A and D together. Had no issues with sway/Wayland/nvidia. Nor with xfce but trying to let x be dead. Don’t have the issue with gnome/Wayland on Intel chips.
That does sound frustrating tbh. Do you think something similar to macOS’s stage manager to help your use-case? I built an extension to enable Window previews in the dock and I’m wondering if it might be useful to add that as a feature.
I’m an AMD fan so I haven’t ran into that issue. I could see how that is a problem though.
Non deterministic alt tabbing with arbitrary “buddy windows” is the most frustrating desktop experience imaginable. It’s less bad without nvidia in the mix but still seen it happen with Intel chips as well. Moved back to sway for tiling goodness and my sanity is restored.
I like hyprland, even tho the devs are assholes
I’m open to switching to similar tiling WMs but I’ve put a lot of time into my current config
I use sway, but I see that Niri is getting a lot of attention during the past months/years. Maybe you can use some AI to convert one config into the other and manually fix here and there while (ironically) keeping Hyprland as a safe place to go if something goes wrong
All of the boxes are KDE, except
Least favorite: GNOME
Current distro: Garuda
Longest-used: XFCE, by far. Current: Wayfire + Noctalia 5.
Favorite: KDE
Least favorite: GNOME (but Adwaita is sick)
First DE used: KDE
Honourable mention: Hyprland, Cosmic
Current DE: KDE
Longest used DE: KDE
DE you wanna use in the future: KDE
Current distro: Bazzite
Yeah…I made my pick :D
I’m still an user of XFCE4. It just works.
Edit: Wrong DE name.
huh. I’ve never heard of that one.
Oh, sorry, it’s XFCE4. I wrote it on my phone and gthe finger pressed the wrong letter.
Sway all the way bay bay
I use Linux btw
Tell me you use Arch (btw) without telling me you use Arch, btw.
well, I thought it was important since usually people using Cosmic are on Pop!_OS
i can’t do these because i only have used linux mint and still use mint
Favorite: In usability KDE, in looks XFCE-winxptc
Least favorite: I3 (I can’t be bothered especially when it’s x11)
First: Unity
Honorauble mention: Hyprland (wasn’t difficult to config)
Current: xfce-winxptc (it almost works perfectly for daily use but dolphin causes the theming to break and resets icons, but most importantly there’s no search I have to use a keyboard shortcut for that.)
Longest used: KDE
DE I wanna use: xfce-winxptc with extra functionality.
Current distro: Cachy OS (First arch based distro that didn’t black screen in the first month.)
Here we go, because why not:
Favorite: LXQt+i3. LXQt plays nice with tiling WMs, GTK and Qt, and it’s just way easier than installing a WM on its own. Tiling WMs are GOAT.
Honorable Mention: Crunchbang/early Bunsenlabs and Cinnamon Least Favorite: Gnome
First: probably Openbox on Crunchbang
Current: LXQt+i3
Longest Used: LXQt+i3
Future: sway, possibly with LXQt if I make the switch after the LXQt devs finish providing Wayland support.
First DE used was definitely Cinnamon. Longest use should be awesome or i3, mah be close. Least favourite definitely awesome though, due to the way you have to configure it. It’s just such a mess. My favourite is also my current: herbstluftwm. Configuring it is actually fun (Btw, I am not into ricing, I am rather implementing unnecessary things). And I am still waiting for a wm which would actually convince me to use on wayland. That one would be the future wm^^
first: gnome current: gnome favourite: niri honourable mention: kde least favourite: cosmic (probably as i used it from an alpha that probably wasn’t ready to daily drive yet) longest used: no idea, i’ve used niri, kde, gnome, xfce and leftwm for considerable periods of time future: i want to go back to niri at some point, just using gnome for the convenience for the moment
First used: TWM / TVWM
Then: FVWM
Then: Windowmaker
Then: Enlightenment (briefly)
Then: Gnome (briefly)
Then KDE (to this day)
I played around with a number of others, but never really used them much.
Favorite and first WM: i3
First and only DE: GNOME
Honorable mention: cinnamon
First: kde Least favorite: xfce Favorite: niri Currently using: niri gnome and kde Honorable mention: cosmic
Gnome with extensions is basically a better cosmic for me
The thing I love about cosmic is the themeing and customization, but most of all the native tiling mode.
Can you really get a good tiling mode on Gnome?
Im assuming you haven’t checked, there are multiple extension options, just look up gnome tiling, I like it
Default gnome is rough, but arcmenu for customizable start menu, and a couple other extensions that ive never had issues with being outdated make it the best de for me, kde I end up adding too much clutter or never feel satisfied customizing compared to gnomes default look
In the 1990s I also used IceWM and Enlightenment. My first DE was KDE, but I have been using GNOME pretty consistently for twenty years.
i3wm still works … I might eventually switch to sway.
I don’t think I can really fit my opinions neatly into these categories. I tend to lean toward Gnome because it does what I need it to do, seems to have the fewest problems and annoyances, while still being fully featured.
I really want to like KDE Plasma, and have been using it more, but it still has a number of things that bug me. Some programs run inexplicably slow on it. It goes a little overboard with notifications and popups. Like do I really need to approve my game controllers almost any time I plug them in?
On the other hand, it really is fully featured, and I love the KDE Connect integration.
Haven’t used anything else in years, cause I always find other des/wms to just be a little too short on features. Did used to like XFCE a lot though.
Hehe. I love these. I wonder what’s next? Text editors? Web browsers? Terminal emulators? Init systems?
I was a mite tempted to make a logo for my xmonad config, that I’ve whimsically been calling a window manager, called Tabularboonad for about 14 years. But really, it’s just an xmonad config.
I was a mite tempted to attempt to wrangle some contrived reasoning, and positioning on the chart, for my wminizer scripts, since (similar to the prior distro one, with my bedrocklinux use), I do not limit myself to just one wm (or distro), and really, I can switch between any window managers I have installed (and have listed in one of wmnizer’s wmrotate scripts (or the selection list, in the wmnizer2 branch)), such as xmonad, dwm, herbstluftwm, spectrwm, dk, icewm, openbox, without restarting X11(Xorg/XLibre/Pheonix/TinyX), keeping all my gui running seamlessly, as I switch wm in a split second. … So if following the logic of BedrockLinux, that it’s the distro I use, not the multitudes within/upon it, then instead of xmonad (+^)I should say wminizer [(oops, just realised i misspelled wminizer as wmnizer in the rudimentary logo I hastily scribbled for it earlier [when tempted use it here], lol, doh.)]. But, that’s not the same. Doesn’t feel right to try use that logic.
I suppose I should not have been so surprised to see xmonad show up so much in this one.
Whee. These are fun.
wasn’t really planning on making another one, but yknow what? Maybe I will make one for web browsers
i3/sway for life
Favourite DE & Current DE: GNOME. Simply the only one with a consistent and modern design.
Least Favourite: cosmic. This needs a lot more polish before I consider it anywhere close to an actual option. Currently it looks childish to me.
First DE used: Unity. It’s been a long, long time.
DE you wanna use in the future: None. I’m done DE hopping, no DE can deliver the level of consistency and polish that GNOME can deliver anymore.
Longest used DE: Pantheon. On elementary OS. Gnome took a long time to get its shit together, but at least it did.
Honourable Mention: KDE. It’s… Meh. It fixed some things consistency-wise, but it’s still stuck in the past when it comes to UI paradigms. It claims customisability, it’s only customisable in ways that barely matter anymore and can only break consistency. Insane workload on the app devs and the theme devs to have something working reliably as well.
have you used Cosmic recently? It sounds like everyone has outdated opinions on it. I’ve been using it for months and I would say it’s long ready for daily use.
You really sound to me like a typical Gnome snob ngl
Gnome snob!
My goodness man have you no decency?!
Good Sire, I must apologize profusely for my own unrecognized shortcomings! I now long see the error of my past self and realize I must remedy it. My deepest apologies, good sir.
BSPWM was my favorite back in the day. Used Hyperland and i3 for a while. I much prefer KDE over Gnome. Mangowm is where it’s at how.
I’d really like to learn Python so I can customize qtile
Current Distro: Devuan GNU+Linux
What’s that raindrop one in the middle?
Hyperland, a wayland based tiling wm
fluxbox