I know Gnome is the default on popular distros: Fedora, Ubuntu, Rhel, Pop OS (it’s Cosmic Desktop yes but it is still based on Gnome)…etc. But Gnome just doesnt work for me. I would pick XFCE - stable and no BS.
Before Manjaro and their cetificate shenanigan, I used to use their XFCE version. At the time, it was marketed as the “Flagship Manjaro version”. I went 4 years without any problems and I did tinker a lot, just couldnt get their XFCE to break.
After a tough Arch or Gentoo installs, I just want to put XFCE on and call it a day.
What about you guys?
There is nothing better than Xfce, if you dont like the desktop, at least Xfce allows you to customize. KDE seems interesting, but the last time i tried it, 10 years ago more or less, it was a bit buggy.
You owe KDE a second look if it’s been that long.
Agreed. I used to be a diehard XFCE fan and hated KDE. Then I saw their resource usage came pretty close to each other but KDE had way more development behind it so they could add Wayland support (which I actually don’t even use.)
KDE used to be buggy and bloated. They’ve been improving stability for years and their efforts really show. I used to think it was bloated, but it really isn’t if you only use the parts you need. I use it pretty similarly to XFCE, it just has more dev support.
I remember when kde looked like xfce and yeah back then it was buggy. Today it looks like a slightly jank windows 7 but with the giant buttons and curved corners that characterize 2015 software.
Most of the bugs seem to come from Wayland still being vaguely trashy and kde not having fully migrated from xorg