Which distro has the best GUI in your opinion?
I've dabbled with Linux over the years, first with Ubuntu in the early 2010s, then Elementary OS when that dropped, and a few years ago I really enjoyed how customizable the gui was with Xubuntu. I was able to make it look just like WIndows 2000 which was really cool.
Which current distro has the best GUI, in your opinion? I find modern Ubuntu to feel a little basic and cheap. I guess I don't really like modern Gnome. I'm currently using Windows 10 LTSC which is probably the best possible version of Windows, but I'd jump to linux if I could find a distro with a gui that feels at least as polished and feature rich as Windows 10 LTSC.
Distro is irrelevant. DE/WM choice is all that matters as far as GUI goes. Also, if you want a GUI that looks or feels like windows then KDE probably has you covered in that you could probably customise it to mimic windows.
I quite like the Desktop Environment in elementaryOS. I think it's called Pantheon Desktop? It's very polished. Or InstantWM from InstantOS is also interesting and has some nice animations and effects.
Personally, I use simple and minimal Openbox
Yes, exactly. haha, the distro has nothing to do with the GUI. That's your Desktop Environment. On almost every single popular distro you can get teh same DE's either through official offerings or community versions.
You can use most desktop environments on most distros.
If a distro has its own GUI and it doesn't exist on other distros, usually that means either it isn't free software or it's not good enough that anyone has bothered to package it for other distros.
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@ADHDefy @bigbox perhaps I should try KDE again, I've been using Gnome for so long now, before that, Xfce. Haven't tried KDE for many years and it didn't seem very polished or have the look and feel but from screenshots, it looks a lot different to back then!
I would wait for the release of plasma 6 before you bother switching though, if you're already comfy!
@Communist Cool, yeah I just remembered hearing a bit about that on @thelinuxexperiment Actually, thinking about it - I'm currently using Pop!_OS as my daily driver and @system76 have been working on Cosmic DE which looks pretty interesting!
I couldn't agree more. I think that tying yourself to a specific distribution is a good way to keep yourself in a box. I think the better question here is "What DE do you prefer?" and then choose your distro based on your preferences for desktop environments while keeping other things in mind (i.e. frozen packages or rolling base).
I, like yourself, pretty much require KDE to be functional on my desktop. A great distro for me is one that ships new KDE releases without much delay (or at least, one that's not completely unreasonable) without having to wait for the next LTS release to get all the goodies. This narrows down the choices pretty substantially as there aren't a lot of distros that meet this spec:
I prefer to have a rolling (or close to rolling base) so that really only leaves me with the top 3 options.
I'm not really here to shill for KDE, but just encourage folks to find the DE that feels most comfortable to them and then work on your requirements from there.
Linux Mint with Cinnamon ... but I am old. 😁
I also enjoy Mint. Simple and easy to use. I wouldn't consider myself old, so I think you shouldn't either!
Lol! Maybe you're right. Maybe I am not that old. I just like simple and easy.
Absolutely nothing wrong with that. Speaking of which I'm starting to feel comfortable enough suggesting Linux as an OS for folks looking for a PC. It's nice, because it really brings old PCs to life. If say my older parent wanted a computer I could buy a decent used one and just slap Mint on there and it would suit their needs.
That is exactly what I did for my mom. Her windows machine was end of life, but the gard were was still fine. I put her on Mint and have not heard a single word about it.
Same, tho I don't think I qualify as "old" quite yet
Linux Mint Cinnamon. Stable, yet tons of customizations possible and makes the jump from Windows a whole lot easier (I jumped 1.5 years ago and will never look back).
+1 for Linux Mint Cinnamon. It just works
I dislike Cinnamon because it doesn't "just work" if you have multiple monitors like I do.
Apps don't sync properly on the taskbar across both of them. The only way to get them to sync properly is to disable the grouped taskbar. People have mentioned this to the Cinnamon devs for years now, and they don't appear to use multiple monitors so they don't care.
KDE Plasma works great with multiple monitors and has been 100% an upgrade over Cinnamon. Plus there's more third-party support for Plasma than there is Cinnamon.
I also use multiple moniters with LM Cinnamon and they work just fine, but I am sorry to hear it doesn't work on your machine! KDE doesn't do it for me aesthetically nor resource-wise, especially on low/mid power laptops while Cinnamon does (although normally I would go for XFCE on low spec hardware). Thankfully we both have the option to choose :)
This is what's currently doing it for me. I'm a 'very' heavy Windows user looking to make the jump out of privacy and telemetry considerations. Mint is what I've settled on for precisely this reason.
Agreed. Linux Mint Cinnamon is also my favorite. I've been using it ever since I stopped using Windows and switched to Linux from Windows XP.
The real question is what Window Manager has the best GUI... you can run any window manager on any distro - it just takes a little work.
If you're talking about out-of-the-box without any user customization, I'll make a couple suggestions that I think work for new Linux users - not that I'm saying you're green, but most power users know they can fully design the OS from the ground up if needed.
PopOS - In between - GNOME-like with some PopOS customizations under the hood.
ElementaryOS - MacOS-like WM thats clean fresh and easy to understand
Mint - Cinnamon DM, Windows-like with some customization possible
As a caveat to this, System76 is working a brand-new DE that they're writing from scratch in Rust called COSMIC Desktop, so they might become less GNOME-like fairly soon. Although presumably you'll still be able to install GNOME on it if you really want to.
System76/PopOS always bringing the noise!!
Pop is is great. The tiling is so easy. There's very little learning curve.
Likewise. I want to like GNOME but always fallback to KDE.
Distro? Probably Debian, because it has all the desktop environments. If you want, you can have Plasma, Gnome, Xfce, Cinnamon, and MATE all installed at the same time and switch between them at will. Most distros seem focused on one specific DE, which if I'm not mistaken means switching to another involves reinstalling the whole operating system.
The big downside of Debian is that the software in it tends to be very out of date. You'll get security updates and the occasional bug fix between Debian releases, but that's about all you'll get.
You can get a rolling-release experience by running the “unstable” version, but as the name implies, upgrades will sometimes fail or break something, and you need to know your way around the system in order to recover from that. Not a problem if you want to learn to be a Linux sysadmin anyway, but if you want your system to Just Work™, then unstable Debian is unfortunately not for you. It's a trade-off, as with most things in life.
Don't most distros have access all desktop environments? I'm assuming OP is asking about the default DE.
They should specify that then. Because right now I'd also answer the question with "all distros".
I'm assuming the OP just wants know what GUI we like best, and the distro is irrelevant.
@PureTryOut @howrar Well there are distros that are specifically geared to their default DE like #Elive #linux #RetroWave There's no way any distro can just 'slap that on' as the saying goes.
https://www.elivecd.org/download/retrowave
I... Have never heard of those. I'm sure there are some distros like that, but the majority (and especially the few mainstream ones) just ship and offer all DE's.
@PureTryOut Well, in general installing a different DE on a distro than the default, tends to be a sad experience. There's lots of work under the hood that are geared to make the default DE nice and slick. It's the reason why there are distros like Xubuntu, Kubuntu and what not.
Tbh the various DE's should work just fine out of the box without additional distro work done outside of packaging. That's the case on Arch Linux, Gentoo Linux and Alpine Linux at least, not sure why it would be different on distros like Ubuntu or Fedora.
They do but I wouldn't really install two DEs in say Ubuntu because it leaves you with a bunch of confusing shit. Debian does it a nice way where they don't interfere with each other.
This is subjective. For me, anything with Mate as desktop environment. Currently using Ubuntu with it.
I'm a conservative user. I don't really care about whistles and bells, nor appeal to novelty. I want something that works and that I'm used to.
Is mate being ported to Wayland? I will die on the hill that gnome 2 was peak gnome.
Initial Wayland support started around 2021. I'm not sure on its current state as I'm still using X, but it's worth trying.
That is great. After some unpleasantness with Ubuntu, I ended up switching my dad to Mint + KDE because of multimonitor support in wayland. Unfortunately, KDE + mint has been a bit janky. Now that mate has been ported, I'll ask him to try that.
MATE is my pick. It's got all the modern features with a relatively simple baseline that is easy to customize, that also come with several presets.
Two or more start menus? You got it. A Plank dock plus taskbars filled with shortcuts and info covering every other edge of the desktop? Hell yeah! A simple Windows, macOS, or old Ubuntu like interface. Yep. Hide it all away leaving a minimalist and clean space to work? Sure can do!
Plus it feels to me more feature rich than even GNOME 3.x (where x≤14; I stopped bothering with its releases later on, so I'm not sure on its current state). And it's easier to get it pretty than Xfce IMO.
Feodora and Debian have a GNOME experience that has not been ruined to make less innovative in favor of making the UX more similar (and therefore familiar) to that of the worst desktop operating system available (windows).
If you've seen but never really used GNOME in a daily workflow it looks and feels alien. Thats becausethey devs are trying to make something that is friendly to the people who actually use it and intuitive to the people who are new to desktop computing, and they are making no attemt to appease thoes who believe that it is impossible to do better than Microsoft has with Windows.
If you've never really used it (and have used ms windows), Vanilla GNOME is alien to you. If you have really used it, nothing else is yet on its level.
I switched from fvwm2 with heavy customizing over to gnome3 years ago.
I love that UX. Use it all day. Private and on my work-computer.
Any distro where I can easily replace the default with sway.
Sway is awesome! Recently started using it, and being able to customize literally everything with simple CSS gives you so much control. Though it is a bit of a double edged sword, as if I don't catch myself I'll never stop tuning it.
I don't see why distros should be married to a specific GUIs. Any distro can support any number of GUIs. It just seems like a huge waste of effort to make a distro just to support one GUI.
I would encourage people who want to implement their unique vision for a GUI to make their effort easily packagable by any distro and to work with an existing community distro to make their work available widely.
I'm using Fedora with GNOME now and enjoying it. If you want a more Windows-like experience, go with Fedora KDE spin.
I use Garuda dragonized with kde plasma as my set up, works for me!
Although KDE is windows like out of the box, it is really customizable without the need of addons, which I like. The Gnome addons can be really cool, but in my experience they can make the desktop less stable and often get abandoned.
i3, and swaywm , I have used almost ... All Linux/BSD/Windows/Osx/Unix Desktop Environments. I really like #enlightenment but it can be pretty buggy especially on wayland.
I'm currently quite happy with i3, but would really like to check out Wayland.
currently the support for barrier/synergy (controlling multiple computers with one keyboard/mouse) seems to be not there - although I saw something about a workaround with the newest synergy version.
would you be so kind to give me some other reasons to hold back?
Anything else that sucks in the new world?
I have never used Synergy , but with sway which is built on top of wayland. I can use multiple monitors and it works great for me. I don't really have a need for multiple computers since I use libvirtd (VirtualManager) and host multiple OS's and share directories between different systems.
multiple monitors is sadly different than multiple computers, side by side
thanks for the input, maybe I'll use a test system first :-)
You can change the DE (desktop environment) as you like but I really like Budgie from Solus. My daily driver is Plasma and find myself on openSUSE Tumbleweed. It's by far the most crash-free and freeze-free experience I've had while using Plasma. Note: Installing Nvidia Drivers is at your own risk, though.
Same here, I've been using Budgie for a couple years and it's awesome!
Imo, I really like linux mint's cinnamon, its so clean and pretty.
I like to use good ol' stable Debian with i3-gaps as a window manager.
I just switched to Fedora 38 with KDE and it's been great! It's using Wayland now too, so it's been really smooth and stable. My last distro was Manjaro with KDE, but I started having issues with the lastet round of updates and wanted to switch to something more stable. I really don't like gnome as it feels to "basic". Sure it looks nice, but for me it feels like it's missing some important features that are just there with the default KDE layout.
I love the versatility of KDE and you can make it look amazing but at the end of the day I always end up with a Gnome-based distro for some reason. The simplicity is just so beautiful. Fedora has been my distro of choice for a few years and I don't see that changing any time soon...it just works! With gaming via Steam/Proton I don't see myself ever returning to Windows.
i really like gnome, especially with extensions like dash to dock, transparent top bar, etc. really nice, simple, and clean ui imo.
Gnome with pop's cosmic extensions is great. Excited to try their rust based replacement once it's ready
Yup, I tend to recommend fedora to my newbie friends because Gnome is simple to switch to and works really well.
I'm using GNOME on Fedora rn and it's bussin
Same. Pretty much the perfect setup for laptop usage. I just use a couple of extensions like Just Perfection to tailor it a bit more, like removing the top bar which I personally don't find useful when I have trackpad gestures and keyboard shortcuts.
@WingedSeven Fedora is pretty much the go-to distro for vanilla GNOME. There's something really enjoyable about distros that just give the DE as-is instead of trying to turn it into something different.
It thoroughly depends on how much you're willing to configure
I think right now EWW + hyprland is the new hotness, if you're willing to edit text files and scripts
If not, go KDE if you like windows, gnome if you like mac.
This is what I use. Love it. It takes a lot of time though. There are a few things I want to improve, but I've become to lazy to do it.
I used the Pop Os default for a long time and just recently switched to i3 Manjaro, it’s been pretty nice once you get past the learning curve of i3
I'm pretty sure I'm legally required to post this anytime someone says they use Manjaro.
Manjaro was the first thing to get me to stop distro-hopping, so it pains me to admit that historically, it's been a very messy project. I've since moved onto openSUSE Tumbleweed and love it (I've also dabbled in NixOS, but it's a lot more hardcore).
If anyone wants the ease of Manjaro, with an Arch base, my understanding is that you should consider EndeavourOS.
Also, if you like i3 but want to use Wayland for any of its superior features, consider SwayWM.
Is there a reason to consider sway if I don’t personally care about visual stuff and just like the way that tiling window managers function. The out of the box i3 manjaro look is perfectly fine for me visually speaking. I intend on eventually learning vanilla arch or something similar when I get more free time, but I mostly just use Linux cause fuck Microsoft and Apple.
The reason is Wayland.
Largely the only difference between i3 and Sway is that i3 is built for X, and Sway uses wlroots, a Wayland compositor. Sway was designed to function as a drop-in replacement for i3, your config should even be 99% compatible.
Since X is essentially a dead project, and Wayland is supposed to be the next step... some people want to make an effort to move away from X... Some people don't.
But it's not really about "visual stuff". It's about technical debt, and a bunch of stuff I don't understand.
Ah ok, that gives me a better idea of what you meant! I can do my own research from there. I definitely don’t wanna stay on a dead project especially when I’m still in the learning stage, much easier to learn now than to relearn later.
Keep in mind that these transitional periods in software can be painful, but generally the replacement is aimed to be painless.
The nice thing about Wayland is that development is mature enough that we can see where it's headed, even if it's not all complete. Most of the available options that use Wayland make it pretty seamless. You won't have to relearn much between sway and i3. You also won't have to relearn anything switching to Wayland in the future if you are already using GNOME or KDE Plasma, for example..
True! I was reading about wayland and sway. I won’t be switching anytime soon as I have a Nvidia Graphics card and I like to play games and the support doesn’t seem to be there quite yet.
I want to like Wayland, but for me it's never not been laggy and weird on me. I hope this will change in the foreseeable future.
GNOME with Dash to Panel is my favorite GUI, but I've been warming up to KDE since their Wayland VRR implementation is complete and working while GNOME keeps waffling over something as stupid as "omg what if we have to show a VRR toggle in the settings??? our users will be CONFUSED!!!!". While GNOME is very smooth and functional with extensions, this stupid limited mindset of the core developers prevents it from being a good choice for gaming. Mutter-VRR fixes it and actually works very well, but they keep breaking it with updates.
@CalcProgrammer1 @bigbox try it with arcmenu too. so good.
Ubuntu Budgie
Note: a lot of people seem to use the Mac inspired app dock and that seems to be the default. It's customizable though so you can get a taskbar if you prefer that.
I think the whole point of Budgie is to make the interface a little more welcoming if you are coming from Windows or Mac.
I like GNOME a lot (currently using Fedora GNOME with a bunch of extensions), but I'm eagerly awaiting the release of System76's COSMIC since it seems like it's basically GNOME with all the customisations I end up making anyway, and will be far more modular and customisable.
Desktop environments are a pretty subjective topic. You probably gonna like KDE plasma or cinnamon..if it's just about looks and feel you're good to go..just find a distro with one of them and test it.
@bigbox with ZorinOS you won't feel the difference when coming from spydows. As soon as I made the switch to Linux I tested over 15 distros and I ended up with ZorinOS Core.
Yeah I installed Linux Mint Cinnamon today and for some reason I couldn't get working drivers for my wifi card installed, so I tried Zorin instead. I really love the look and feel,
but I'm still having the no wifi issue. Weird. If I can't get it to work I may need to buy a new wireless adapter. Mine is the Asus PCE-AC68Edit: Fixed it by cutting all power to the power supply, waiting a few minutes, pushing the power button while there was no power to fully drain any remaining power from the board, then I flipped the power supply back on, turned on the computer, booted straight to bios, then to Linux, now everything works great.
Do a sudo dmesg | grep -i wireless or sudo dmesg | grep -i wifi and see if any errors pop up. Once you find what is causing issues, you can figure out what to do next :)
@bigbox drivers sit in the linux kernel. You'll need to wait for next iteration of OS to get a newer kernel that might include your wifi model as well. ZorinOS 17 is due to be released in a few months.
Distro doesn't really matter nowadays. You can get all desktop environments to work on most distros. Especially the big players like KDE, Gnome, Xfce have hundred distros they are shipped with by default. Most big distros have versions for each of the most popular desktop environments. Therefore, I would suggest that you look for the distro which fits your needs best and then install the desktop environment you want to work with afterwards, if there isn't a flavor of your distro that ships with it already.
The distro which comes with the best customization in my opinion is Pop!_OS. Simple, clean, straightforward and comes with the POP SHELL which basically simulates a tiling window manager
And the good news is: Pop Shell can be installed on other GNOME based desktops. I'm currently rockin' it on Manjaro GNOME.
I believe they plan to switch "soon™" to a new Rust-based desktop environment they are developing.
I'm actually quite excited about this, even though I don't use Pop!_OS, since I'm not really a fan of either Gtk nor Qt, and I believe Rust has a lot of potential to make a clean, modern and stable framework for OS development that isn't over-complicated by layers and layers of abstraction & technical debt.
A new major and modern desktop enveroinment would finally bring some fresh air to the whole *Nix desktop world!
You might be looking for a KDE desktop. Many of Windows's better more modern desktop features are copied from it, and KDE is very customizable out of the box without needing to install a bunch of extensions like you do with Gnome. KDE can be customized to fit many different desktop paradigms, with the default being like Windows 10.
Absolutely love GNOME on Fedora. Workstations + Hotkeys are amazing. I really dig the minimalism and compartmentalisation it offers.
Being able to easily switch workspaces with just super + scroll is so nice. Sadly I had to switch to xorg to get certain apps to work, so I can't do that anymore (I know it works if you put your mouse at the top of the screen but I play a lot of games in fullscreen).
I'm going to hop in here and suggest you try out Linux Mint. This is a distro designed for people who are coming over from Windows or Mac. It "just works". The UI doesn't throw away thrity years of convention simply to be "linux". Everything is exactly where you expect it to be and most of what you need is already installed.
Mint offers a choice of different desktop environments which are all laid out exactly the same, but have differing degrees of polish. If you're using a very old PC, you may want to choose XFCE because it is very lean, but lacks some of the nice graphical touches. Most people just use the Cinnamon desktop environment, which is highly customizable and polished.
I fully switched to Mint many years ago and never looked back.
Good old Debian stable with JWM, IceWM or Trinity Desktop for me. Its very efficient, clean and gets out of the users way. Will probably move to LabWC on Wayland when its ready.
I recently started using KDE with i3 as the window manager - I've long been looking for a full-fleged DE with good window tiling, and KDE + i3 does that so well and is so easy to set up it's like they were made to work together. So I just use Kubuntu and add i3 on top of that, easy peazy
I've been enjoying Gnome using [email protected]. It's not perfect, but good enough. The preinstalled tiling extension also makes using a full DE bearable without spending hours customizing a WM.
I'm looking forward to trying out Cosmic, which I have high hopes for.
Fedora with Gnome
My vote would be EndeavourOS with KDE Plasma.
What makes Endeavour better than KDE neon? I'm a noob but I thought neon was made by the actual pladma devs?
I'm pretty sure KDE neon is only meant for testing KDE applications and so isn't guaranteed to be stable with anything but those packages. Other distros should be maintained with more general-purpose use in mind
The distro choice and the DE choice are two separate things, you really shouldn't care much about which distro is better for which DE, the only part of that that really matters is which has the most up to date version of that DE, if you even want that.
Endeavour is based on Arch while KDE neon was based on kubuntu i think it was ones not strictly better than the other it just depends on what you want from the OS
I'm not aware of any distro that ships this by default yet, but Hyprland is my favorite visually so far. Excited for it to continue to develop. I'm sticking with Sway for now, Hyperland's grouping isn't nearly as extensive as Sway's tabbing and stacking, hopefully that will come eventually, but Hyprland sure does look amazing.
oh, i will have to give Hyprland a try! i was using Sway for a while, until i switched to gnome, and then KDE, because of growing pains with screensharing (which might be fully gone by now, i should give it another try)
Screen sharing pains aren't completely gone in Sway, unfortunately. I can usually share my entire screen successfully, on a handful of programs at least, but that isn't super helpful since I have an ultrawide screen. The other party can never really see anything clearly. Hyprland supposedly does have window sharing in addition to full screen sharing though, so that's huge.
But yea even just a few days ago I tried to shift + video call in Element for a screen share in Sway and Element just crashed, had to hop on i3 for that.
Same here. I even switched to hyprland until the split stopped working like how it used to in sway. Quickly switching between tabbed and split was a key part of my sway workflow and the way that it's done in hyprland now as far as I know, isn't really cutting it.
So splits on Hyprland used to work more similarly to Sway, and they purposely moved away from it?
I'm not sure if it was on purpose or they just didn't implement it to the correct spec.
The behaviour I want is this: I have say A and B on a desktop split into half vertically. Then I press a key and they become tabbed. I have A on one half and B and C on the other half split horizontally, then pressing a key makes B and C tabbed.
What happens in hyprland is this: you select a given window to be a tab parent. Then you can open an new window to make the two tabbed. However if you switch from tabbed to non tabbed, you can't go back with a key combo. You need to repeat the whole process.
It's such a small thing but has made hyprland kind of weird for me.
check this out https://github.com/outfoxxed/hy3
Hey, you're a lifesaver! This looks like exactly what I was looking for. Going to try this out after work today :) Wish I could give you a star or something!
you should give hy3 a star :P
I had forgotten that I actually have a GitHub account 😅 Will do :)
I have to remind myself to check on Hyprland again too, I'm on the same boat, currently on sway.
My main gripe with i3/sway is how you don't have an easy way to just go to the next window in the workspace... I just want to have a couple of shortcuts for cycling back and forth in the window list (regardless of how that list is ordered). The 4-directional approach i3/sway takes messes up with my keybinding workflow and if you have floating windows it makes it very awkward to try and select them, to the point that I end up using the mouse a lot more than I'd need to.
I've been using i3 for the past 8 years or so, and can wholeheartedly recommend it (or it's cousin Sway if you're in Wayland-land) if you're into tiling window managers (there are dozens of us!). I find them invaluable for their keyboard-centric operation, and also massively sweet on ultrawide monitors. Light on resources and minimalistic too.
As far as distributions go, I've been on Arch for the past several years. I think there are some (unofficial) spins for most Linux flavours with i3 out-of-the-box.
I used XFCE for a long long time before I went to tiles, which is a decent more traditional Window Manager, with a more lean focus than some of the others. Fairly customizable. I still use some of the system apps from there from old habit.
I wouldn't get too tied up into what window manager is default in any given distribution. At least for me, part of the joy is finding a combination of software (including the desktop environment/Window Manager) that works for you specifically. And there are plenty of live CDs (or usb images now I guess) with various WMs that can be used to take things out for a spin without commiting to installing it. :) Here are various Ubuntu flavors for instance.
I've been preferring KDE lately tbh. Very flexible and familiar. Still don't know what that activity thing is for though lol
Tried out Plasma 6?
No not yet, waiting for it to get a little more stable first
They have announced VRR haven't they? Along with the work being done on HDR, it feels like things are really shaping up.
Pop yea? Yeah?!
Fedora. It ships vanilla GNOME which is just a very pleasant experience. Vanilla GNOME is just something else man.
I'm more of a window manager person myself (Qtile to be precise), and I imagine that's not really what you're looking for here, but DE-wise from what I've tried I like KDE and XFCE the most
Yeah, this may not be helpful for you but the best GUI is a tiling window manager (compositor?). Using it for 2.5 years, never looked back. I really recommend Hyprland for everyone to try, it's the perfect thing we've ever needed.
I liked zorin os
I think i3 looks really pretty
Fedora or OpenSUSE with Gnome. Stable, GUI friendly, and simple.
I probably switch what I'm using every few months. The thing I cannot live without though is tiling support, whether just inherent to the window manager I'm using or an extension, I find it painful to use a computer for anything serious without one now.
Currently using KDE with the Bismuth extension (Fedora Kinoite) which isn't perfect but not bad. I'm eyeing Hyprland up from afar but as an Nvidia user I have too many issues on Wayland at the moment.
I use KDE Plasma on RebornOS (an arch spin).
XFCE
I am into KDE Plasma, it works quite well on my distro (Fedora by the way) and one thing that I like about is is that I can make it truly mine. Defaults are nice, however sometimes I think I don't need that or need something else, and quite often I manage to do it to be the most comfortable for me. It's also very customisable and with enough learning you could rice it into quite a lot of stuff, even though I myself don't really know a lot how people do it.
I've been using linux on and off since my first experiments with zipslack back in 2000-2001, and full time since 2006. I've bounced around distros, tried countless DEs and WMs, and I have to say, Mint Cinnamon was the first where I didn't have to immediately change the theme/icons/color schemes/etc. to make it look decent (in my opinion). And add to that a more traditional desktop paradigm at a time when others (unity, gnome 3) were trying something else, and I was a convert, and still use it to this day, some 8+ years later.
Kubuntu or KDE Neon 100%
Ultimately they both use the KDE Plasma desktop environment, which is the only DE I've ever seen that has a proper modern look by default (others IMO look like either the 2000's or an OS 4 Kidz), as well as being pretty featurful for multi monitor productivity
Arch+KDE Plasma is what I personally am gonna switch to this summer
Check out KDE Debian spin too. I booted the live iso to check some stuff and was seriously impressed. Gave me the early ubuntu 10-11 vibe where the OS just stays out of your way.
Arch + KDE Plasma is very comfy, I used this myself for a few years and it felt super clean and unintrusive.
Its also pretty easy to get it setup to a semi-customized basic look and feel. Use one of the bigger themes, a popular Icon pack and a nice matching wallpaper as well as a little task bar customization and some widgets and youre set, and all this takes less than two hours.
All of them. Every distro can run any desktop, so all of them.
Opensuse because of Yast; Yast does not have the best UI, but for some settings it's the only option if you don't want to use terminal.
+1 for YaST. I'm just lazy and it help a lot
YaST is the reason that when I'm considering distro-hopping again, I don't.
I haven't been on Linux for a while, but I tried out Ubuntu many years ago. I remember there was an update on GNOME that I really liked, before Ubuntu decided to replace it with its own UI? I'd have to dig into what happened because I completely forgot even the year when it happened.
Anyway, I remember liking that new GNOME look. Not sure if it has changed again or not.
You probably mean Gnome 3. Ubuntu then developed and used its own DE Unity for a while. They have since changed back to Gnome though. And Gnome has changed again with Gnome 40 and up.
Nitrux, it's a Debian distro with KDE, a rather classic pair indeed, but their Maui Kit is what makes it really stand out IMO... Well worth a look 😁
I really like the GUI in Pop!_OS. It's a custom GNOME installation with some sort of window tiling manager I don't know what it's called-- not sure what it's called, but I adore it. I really like it, and I like their system themes, too. It's very macOS-like. Simple, clean, and functional with a lot of little custom tweaks put in by system76 to cover some gaps in GNOME's basic configuration and things that are missing from Ubuntu (Pop!_OS is an Ubuntu variant).
Others have mentioned Linus Mint with Cinnamon. I haven't used it in several years, but I recall it being very nice and simple. It's very Windows-like, which I'm not a fan of, but the interface was quite pretty, as I recall.
For me, it's Fedora + KDE when I need a GUI. I used to be an AwesomeWM guy for a very long time but I needed a proper GUI for my 5 year old. I'll convert her to i3 or Awesome one day....
If you’re interested - XFCE has many keyboard shortcuts to achieve tiling-like behavior. Might be a good compromise.
I'll check it out, haven't used XFCE in about a decade.
Does awesome have a Wayland port? I was debating i3 vs awesome at the very beginning and ended up going with i3. Curious to try out something different.
It does not. I don't use Wayland honestly so I'm not sure what window manager(s) would be comparable.
No worries :) I hope someone does though :) I think awesome is unique in its philosophy.
Im honestly a GNOME person. Part of that is due to me needing magnification and a screen reader to use a computer for sure, but its also very keyboard driven and that is how i use computers
Me too, GNOME is great until you have to do something productive and you can't have desktop icons. The desktop icon extensions are bad, they don't allow for drag and drop from other apps / places and the icon grid works poorly compared to Windows/macOS.
When I switched over permanently at the release of proton, I went with Cinnamon since it was the most familiar to me. Before that I tried Ubuntu in the past.
After 2 years on Cinnamon I switched over to KDE Plasma since I want more tweakability and customization and Cinnamon and Gnome in general is just severely lacking in that regard.
And it was a good choice as well since KDE has a lot of options to tweak and I can make it look how I want. I also love fluid animations and KDE has that in spades together with early and now very stable Wayland support.
I could not be happier and I don't see any reason to ever switch to another GUI.
I'm happy just sitting on Debian 12 with KDE Plasma. I don't really consider any the "best", but it does what I need and has never bothered me.
Honestly Opensuse with gnome or kde is really amazing!
Just trying out OpenSuse microOS currently, as an alternative to Fedora Kinoite, and the installer doesnt even load.
I dont like Ubuntus variant of Gnome. I think GNOME can look good but its apps are often horrible. Mint has a better set of simple but powerful tools.
But I would stay with anything rocking KDE. I recommend fedora Kinoite fro ublue.it (better video previews and working RPM firefox basically), its a really great distro.
I was a major opensuse tumbleweed fan to start, but this period has been fading for me as well. I can't really put my finger on it, but several prominent members of the community just seem to always rub me the wrong way. It's kind of like being told to go do it yourself if you want to see something done, but then being told you did the thing you wanted done wrong or you're using OpenSUSE incorrectly if you feel the urge to do the things you tried to do. I've also noted the hostility to KDE in various exchanges as well, which is very weird since a lot of KDE development is apparently done on OpenSUSE.
I have a major server running MicroOS that I'm looking to ditch and do a re-install on, but "stable, rolling" is a hard niche to fill when you might be looking for some extra kernel features that can't/don't ship directly in the Linux kernel. I'm stuck for now, but keen on the lookout for a decent replacement that fills the same niche as MicroOS for a server.
Crazy! Also I found the installer to be pretty weird.
I think I got it working now, the LUKS screen is blue and shows an error...
And Fedora Kinoite is not Beta at all. Its just as stable as KDE can be it seems, it has some weird timing bugs sometimes, but it works well and is very up to date.
Ublue is also essential, it bloats it a bit but thats nessecary.
Currently I am using Cinnamon with Debian and quite like it. Previouly I enjoyed XFCE, espacially on slower laptops. Never really liked GNOME or KDE Plasma though. GNOME has too many animations and feels slow. At the same time its not very customizable. KDE on the other hand feels slow as well and though it is kind of fancy it seems not to be my taste and I did not like the way you customize either. That is not so important to me anymore. So please don't read from this that Cinnamon or XFCE would be great for customization. I would not know it.
I use cinnamon on capable pcs with large screens but on anything weaker or anything with a smallish screen I use xfce.
Gnome 3 is OK and it doesn't interfere with gaming or fullscreen mode programs as hard, in fact it's superior to even cinnamon in this regard. It's frowned upon for high resource usage but the way it deals with fullscreen works really well as long as it doesn't crash for some other reason. I dont use Gnome because without extensions, it's a barely usable mess. VERY ESSENTIAL extentions like Window List or that one that makes the top bar work on multiple monitors take forever to get updated every time a new Gnome version comes out.
KDE Plasma seems to be a good choice. A lot of people seem to have good experiences with it. I'm not one of those people. First of all, that keyring bullshit alone is too much to deal with. I already type my login password once when I first boot up which is pushing my patience in the first place but KDE makes me ADDITIONALLY type in my keyring password in order for essential drivers and wifi to work? Fuck no. Also, that update nag screen is the absolute worst. It's almost worse than Windows fucking 10. It may not kick you off so it can update but it pops up at the worst possible time with impeccable timing. Just about every time I'm jacking off to some porn, right as I'm cumming the stupid fucking update screen pops up and I blow my load to the update screen. I don't know how KDE gets the timing just right but this happens too fucking often. These 2 issues already push it pretty far past usability for me but I'm not done. The 3rd pillar of KDE's shittiness is the file transfer window (or lack thereof). The only way to know the status of a file transfer is by looking at the window icon in the taskbar where the transfer progress bar is overlayed with about 0.00000000000000000000000000001% opacity. There is almost no difference between the "progress bar" color and the "no progress bar" color. That's just the major issues, there are others but I'm not writing a fuckin book about KDE.
Xfce is good. It'll run on anything without really sacrificing too many features. The biggest hit to it's usability is that the start menu doesn't have a search bar but if you're using like a pentium 1 or something this is a feature not a bug. There exist add-ons that add a search bar anyway. If you need something even more lightweight, use CDE, NSCDE or if you're really desperate to not waste cpu clock cycles, dwm. I had to use an Athlon XP as my main pc for school for a few weeks in the year 2016 and using xfce still didn't give me enough leeway to run YouTube very well even with a GeForce 6800.
I use Cinnamon primarily though. It has its share of stupid bullshit. For example they made an attempt to make the ui customizable like KDE but you can't get a taskbar on the second monitor or do anything useful with custom panels at all. If you want to make a custom panel that does anything other than render a useless gray rectangle on your screen, you're out of luck. You do get a lot of customization options for the window icons/labels on the 1 working taskbar though. Being able to see what's going on at a glance makes all the difference. I do get random occasional crashes that seem to be possibly related to context menu bugs. It doesn't happen often but there's no way to really break out of it without power cycling the computer when it does. Print screen area select doesn't work as well as it does on gnome and you can't change the directory of where screenshots are saved (you're supposed to be able to with dconf editor but it doesn't work).
Tl:dr KDE bad. Gnome meh. Xfce fast. Cinnamon is my favorite one right now all things considered.
I have to agree. The way I could move fullscreen applications to other displays in GNOME was great
Any with MATE or Xfce as an option (which tbh is basically all major distros). I just use a specific theme to give me the glossy, frutiger aero look and I'm happy. Currently on EndeavourOS using MATE as my DE.
Pop OS on my main laptop. Fedora 38 on the second. I like gnome
KDE and Ubuntu
Garuda is the first distro to really excite me visually since the KDE3 days. I just wished it booted faster.
Never heard of it before seeing this but it looks really cool. I might have to give it a spin.
Probably any distro that ships KDE Plasma 5 as default - I'm stuck with GNOME for now as I need to use Evolution for work (EWS mail accounts), but if I had the choice I'd probably be on Plasma.
100%
It's hard to use anything else once you've configured plasma to do the exact things you want.
I tried many but for me, Linux mint cinnamon worked. It was traditional, but still had pkeyof customisation options. Also, to top it all off, it's light enough and works on a 13 year old pc I've got here.
Currently using Fedora as my daily driver, stock GNOME + the "Dash to Dock" extension with the dock on the left is the perfect setup for me.
I'm an arch kde user, but I gotta say Elementary / pantheon is / was incredibly beautiful. They took a lot of the simplistic design principles from iOS, and made something even prettier.
I run tiny core linux for the UI personally
If best GUI means configurable and pretty, I have not yet found an alternative that can compete with good old Xfce. It is the only modern desktop environment for which I can still modify the theme of the window decorations to my liking. It is fast and stays out of the way. Using it both on Ubuntu and MX Linux, both based on Debian.
If you like Xubuntu then you like XFCE, which in my opinion is an excellent DE and WM, light on resources while being highly customisable.
What I run is MX Linux, which is Debian based with a few tweaks, like not relying on SystemD, has both APT and flatpak, and has a few custom tools that honestly makes using linux soooo much easier. The repository manager and gui package mabager is very good.
MX customizes XFCE with simple theming and most importantly puts the panel to the left side, maximizing vertical space. It really gets out of your way.
I love me some good old MATE desktop. Especially with how Linux Mint customizes it, it's pretty good
I’m not experienced in all the options, but am quite happy with Cinnamon on Mint. I tried ElementaryOS first, 18 months ago, but it wasn’t quite right. Cinnamon had given me a few points to tweak, but not too many that I’ll be sucked into it. I can do what I want on my computer and don’t feel like the OS ui layer is in my way.
I like qtile because it's configured in python. I used archlinux as os. It's hard to move to another distro after using archlinux for 15 years.
XFCE on all systems where a desktop is nessesary. With all 3D effects disabled.
i hate to say this but ubuntu gnome looks sexiest to me (if were speaking out of the box). too bad they make questionable decisions
I fell in love with xubuntu ten years ago. I wouldn't change it for anything.
IMO, the best GUI is Deepin.
But unfortunately the ubuntu port is not working well
The last “beautiful” out the box distro I tried was a small one based on arch called XeroLinux that was just a customised KDE Plasma.
For some reason I find stock GNOME UIs appealing
Honestly KDE on Fedora is my go-to. It's super customizable on a very reliable system and up-to-date packages. Everything I want in a distro 👍
Maybe it's just that it's familiar, but Zorin OS has always had the most "it just works" GUI to me. It's clean, stable, and provides many sensible presets if you prefer windows environments, mac environments, old school gnome, etc.
Aside from being very pretty it also has great UX and linux beginner onboarding features. For example if you try to open an exe file for the first time, it explains that this is a Windows-specific file and sets up Wine for you.
A lot of people recommend Fedora and PopOS for people getting into Linux but honestly Zorin Core has always been my #1.
Using Zorin OS right now and it might be my favorite Linux distro ever. It's like a stock, good version of Windows 10 or 11 (it's obviously not Windows but that's just an easy comparison visually speaking). For the longest time I couldn't get myself to fully switch to Linux due to needing to use video editing software for my job, but installing DaVinci Resolve Studio on Zorin was a breeze, and they even have an easy to follow guide for doing so.
i use fedora, but any gnome distro with this guy's themes https://github.com/Fausto-Korpsvart/Gruvbox-GTK-Theme looks great, bunch of other variants as well outside of just gruvbox
I'm most comfortable using Manjaro Cinnamon right now. It was familiar enough coming from Windows.
I kept wanting to try the new GNOME, but it kept failing me on fundamentals - I.e, refusing to rebind certain keys, constantly failing plugins (such as the one to merge window title bars with the topbar), and bugs gallore.
So for years, I was a GNOME 2->KDE refugees, with only minimal complaints. KDE is nice.
But now it seems GNOME has finally stabilized and conceded enough to user wishes that it's useful again. And with those things done, I'm now quite enjoying it.
I hate the new flat theme. It was the last bastion of non flatness for so long.
I mostly care about it not being in my way, but I see what you mean.
Deepin is great too. Unfortunately it is not fully translated so that you come across Chinese quite often.