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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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I also enjoy Mint. Simple and easy to use. I wouldn’t consider myself old, so I think you shouldn’t either!
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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.
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Same, tho I don’t think I qualify as “old” quite yet
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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:
- Arch
- Tumbleweed
- Fedora
- NixOS (debatable on the keeping KDE up-to-date iirc)
- KDE Neon
- Ubuntu with PPAs (least favourite way to stay up to date though)
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.
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!
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
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!
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And the good news is: Pop Shell can be installed on other GNOME based desktops. I’m currently rockin’ it on Manjaro GNOME.
I like to use good ol’ stable Debian with i3-gaps as a window manager.
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 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.
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.
Fedora with Gnome
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.
