suggest a Linux DE or WM

[Matt3o]

I've always installed Gnome because at the end it's the DE that creates me less issues but I can't say I like it.

I really like KDE, global shortcuts, dolphin, high customizability... but it totally knees any system I give to it. Sometimes applications take forever to start (with that terrible bouncy cursor) and sometimes they do not even start... open them again and 2 windows of the same application show up.

Cinnamon is very nice, a light version of gnome, but I had issues with some software (virtualbox, blender, draftsight, ...) and anyway it's too tight to mint (you basically end up with a mint distro).

xfce looks a bit prehistoric on a modern PC, does it have a compositing layer?

there are all those fluxbox, openbox, blackbox. I tried them a couple of times but, the configuration process seemed a bit tedious and anyway I don't think they are actively developed anymore.

Do you have any suggestions? What do you use?

[jdcarpe]

I read the title...

1. Suggest Gnome Classic. Oops, OP doesn't like Gnome.

2. Suggest XFCE. Oh no, OP says it looks outdated, and I don't know what a compositing layer is or does.

3. Suggest Fluxbox. Well, crap. OP wants something easy to setup.

4. Maybe JWM? http://joewing.net/projects/jwm/

5. LXDE? http://www.lxde.org/

[Matt3o]

I don't mind putting my hand on configuration files, but I can't spend a week trying to find the perfect combination of un-documented options

I'll have a look at JWM. LXDE is more or less like XFCE (just even more basic hence lighter)

[nuclearsandwich]

I used to be a heavy DWM user. To the point where the window manager I had wasn't really dwm anymore but was instead my own thing. After that I switched to wmii to get the plan9fs integration. When wmii fell under maintained I switched to i3wm which I can recommend as having the best bits of wmii and dwm in my opinion. Tiling takes time to get used to but once you do it's a productivity and efficiency victory. It's so much more efficient than fullscreening every running application, which is how I cope with Mac OS and less manual than Windows 7 and 8's pane-ing shortcuts.

Once KDE's plasma stuff matures a little bit I'll probably start using KDE with tiling but right now KDE's HiDPI support isn't there.

[jwaz]

I really like openbox and i3. Though I haven't put enough time into my configs to really make it my own the crunchbang version of openbox is pretty sweet stock.

[Matt3o]

i3 is probably the most actively developed of the tiling wm. I'm probably going to give it shot. For some reason I always have to go back to gnome which ends up being the one that runs everything I need. I wish KDE weren't such a hog

[Hundrakia]

I loved my time with LMDE, fwiw

[hjkl_over_wasd]

When was the last time you tried KDE? It has gotten some major overhaul that should improve performance. Make sure you're using the latest stable version. The file indexer is among the recent improvements, which used to tie up a lot of resources. You can try to disable it and see if that helps. Also, I hope you've disabled all the desktop effects. KDE shouldn't really be much more demanding than Gnome 2.

I'm always amazed at how light weight e17/18 is, perhaps you should try it out. Really great performance on old hardware, with lots of eye candy, features and customizing options.

I'd also like to remind you of how cheap SSD's are and how they're truly the one thing you can purchase that is guarantied to boost performance significantly.

Otherwise all the other advice you've gotten here is really sound. Perhaps LXDE is worth following while they get the Qt integration through beta.

Good luck.

[osi]

Recently I made the switch to i3 coming from fluxbox.

My only regret is that I didn't try i3 sooner.

Customizing the wm is very straight forward and well documented. It also supports reload on the fly.

All KDE apps are still accessible and useable. Same goes for gnome, lxde, etc..

Try it meoooow

[heedpantsnow]

Lol I was an alpha tester for Enlightenment and remember the day Gnome came out. 'Bout 20 years ago. And yet I have absolutely no clue what you guys are talking about lol. Been too long since I played with Linux!

[Smasher816]

I'm another person who loves i3 but I recognize that tiling window managers are not everyone's cup of tea. (However, I suggest you try one for a few days. You might find it difficult to go back).

Luckily (or unluckily) there are tons of choices with Linux. I am sure you can find something that suites you. Knock yourself out - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/window_manager

[Matt3o]

When was the last time you tried KDE? It has gotten some major overhaul that should improve performance. Make sure you're using the latest stable version. The file indexer is among the recent improvements, which used to tie up a lot of resources. You can try to disable it and see if that helps. Also, I hope you've disabled all the desktop effects. KDE shouldn't really be much more demanding than Gnome 2.

I'm always amazed at how light weight e17/18 is, perhaps you should try it out. Really great performance on old hardware, with lots of eye candy, features and customizing options.

I'd also like to remind you of how cheap SSD's are and how they're truly the one thing you can purchase that is guarantied to boost performance significantly.

Otherwise all the other advice you've gotten here is really sound. Perhaps LXDE is worth following while they get the Qt integration through beta.

I have an SSD and the last time I tried KDE was a couple of years ago. Everything goes pretty smooth with QT based software, but as soon as you go GTK (ie: 80% of the times for me) it becomes quite unresponsive. I'm on Archlinux so I always get the latest vanilla version.

Dolphin and the system wide shortcuts are the things that I love most of KDE, I don't like the direction Gnome has taken, but at the end it's the DE that gives me less headache.

I'll give i3 a spin but I usually slip in some issues with software like cinelerra or draftsight on "extreme" environments.

[StylinGreymon]

I use Gnome with i3 as my WM, and I love it.
i3, that is.

Gettin' kinda sick of Gnome, and GTK in general.

[osi]

Flux is still my second favorite wm. The config is plaintext and also reloadable on the fly. It is not as fault tolerant as i3 however. Flux also behaves more like a traditional window manager to make the transition easier.

ALT +  right mouse drag to resize windows. I hunted those corners of windows for years doing resizing before I realized that .... qqqq

[davkol]

KDE Plasma, derp. People keep complaining that it's slow, but dunno... I don't even have an SSD. Maybe it's because I don't use crappy proprietary GPU blobs. Or maybe I'm just indifferent to sensory feedback.

I simply don't use Akonadi, disable Nepomuk/Baloo, remove the taskbar and change themes to something different from Oxygen/Air (currently rocking some retro Win98-like theme/decoration and Product Plasma theme). Oh, and Lancelot and Yakuake are total must-haves. It's literally the only DE that works for me (even better than any mix of fapfapfap minimalist fapfapfap utils). Configured in five minutes.

[osxoep]

I use XFCE with compton for compositing.

[Leimi]

XFCE is great as a simple and lightweight "normal" de, just like LXDE.

i3 is great as a manual tiling wm while awesome-wm is great as an automatic tiling wm (but can require a lot of config). You may wanna test both, as using one is notably different from the other even if they're both tiling wm (manual vs automatic). Tiling wm are perfect for us keyboard lovers

If you want best of both worlds (floating wm + tiling wm), openbox + pytyle is a great combo. You have the simplicity of a floating wm with openbox and windows are tiled automatically + keyboard shortcuts are available to move everything with pytyle.

[nuclearsandwich]

I just used Cinnamon for the first time today while using a Mint-based live install to help recover a friend's laptop and I am supremely impressed. It was snappy (even running off of a crappy USB drive) and full featured and lovely to look at. I may give it a try to see how it handles multi-touch and tablet rotation.

[Matt3o]

I had troubles with XBMC on cinnamon, and I don't like the fact that you basically convert any distro to Mint.

[lkong]

Go with awesome wm.
once go tilt never go back.

[Joshua K.]

I was a happy wmii user for a long time.  I love how it arranges the windows in columns, in my eyes this is intuitive, efficiently usable and quite flexible.  It is really a shame that this great window manager is no longer maintained.

I suggest to try dwm, xmonad and awesome.  But I still have not settled on a new window manager myself, as nothing comes close to beloved wmii ...

I must say that I found i3 to be one of the worst tiling window managers I have tried.  It was nice in the beginning, when it copied wmii's behaviour, but now that they have switched to that nested container layout, I find it confusing and inefficient usage-wise.  I strongly suggest to first try a tiling window manager with a simple master-slave arrangement paradigm like dwm, instead of struggling with complicated nested layouts.

Edit: While I think tiling is the way to go, the new Qt-based lightweight environment LXQt may be a feasible choice, as you like KDE but find it too slow.

[Hundrakia]

I was a happy wmii user for a long time.  I love how it arranges the windows in columns, in my eyes this is intuitive, efficiently usable and quite flexible.  It is really a shame that this great window manager is no longer maintained.

I suggest to try dwm, xmonad and awesome.  But I still have not settled on a new window manager myself, as nothing comes close to beloved wmii ...

I must say that I found i3 to be one of the worst tiling window managers I have tried.  It was nice in the beginning, when it copied wmii's behaviour, but now that they have switched to that nested container layout, I find it confusing and inefficient usage-wise.  I strongly suggest to first try a tiling window manager with a simple master-slave arrangement paradigm like dwm, instead of struggling with complicated nested layouts.

Edit: While I think tiling is the way to go, the new Qt-based lightweight environment LXQt may be a feasible choice, as you like KDE but find it too slow.

i3 is definitely more thinking with the nesting than needs be.

[Smasher816]

I was a happy wmii user for a long time.  I love how it arranges the windows in columns, in my eyes this is intuitive, efficiently usable and quite flexible.  It is really a shame that this great window manager is no longer maintained.

I suggest to try dwm, xmonad and awesome.  But I still have not settled on a new window manager myself, as nothing comes close to beloved wmii ...

I must say that I found i3 to be one of the worst tiling window managers I have tried.  It was nice in the beginning, when it copied wmii's behaviour, but now that they have switched to that nested container layout, I find it confusing and inefficient usage-wise.  I strongly suggest to first try a tiling window manager with a simple master-slave arrangement paradigm like dwm, instead of struggling with complicated nested layouts.

Edit: While I think tiling is the way to go, the new Qt-based lightweight environment LXQt may be a feasible choice, as you like KDE but find it too slow.

i3 is definitely more thinking with the nesting than needs be.

I just really like how it treats multiple monitors. With each screen being its own workspace. It makes it nice and easy to move stuff between screens - where in awesome each workspace would change all the screens.

I usually only have one or two windows open in a workspace, and then switch between workspaces to get what I want - maybe a floating window or two. Ohh and the scratchpad can be nice for a music player and other stuff. I do agree that getting a complicated layout with i3 is a lot of work.

[microsoft windows]

YOU SHOULD FIND A GUI THAT LOOKS LIKE WINDOWS 98. THEN IT WILL INVOKE GLORIOUS MEMORIES OF THE HEYDAY OF COMPUTING.

[davkol]

Didn't the original Windows use tiling though? They couldn't ship it with floating windows, because of Apple IIRC… that had copied the desktop from Xerox. Yeah, the two most powerful OS vendors in the desktop market nowadays. Pathetic.

Speaking of that, what are you doing on the internets, microsoft windows? Why don't you use The Microsoft Network?

[microsoft windows]

Didn't the original Windows use tiling though? They couldn't ship it with floating windows, because of Apple IIRC… that had copied the desktop from Xerox. Yeah, the two most powerful OS vendors in the desktop market nowadays. Pathetic.

Speaking of that, what are you doing on the internets, microsoft windows? Why don't you use The Microsoft Network?

I just visited the Microsoft Network this morning!

http://www.msn.com/

[pr0ximity]

I really like openbox and i3. Though I haven't put enough time into my configs to really make it my own the crunchbang version of openbox is pretty sweet stock.

Popping in to show my support for Crunchbang, loved that distro since college. I'd echo that their OOTB openbox is pretty great.

[Matt3o]

arch linux is my weapon of choice and I hardly see myself going to anything different on desktop (other story on a server of course).

I will probably give openbox a shot but there are certain things that I will probably miss (does drag-n-drop of pictures from the browser to the fs work for example?)

[SL89]

I just wrote a big whole thing about Crunchbang but it seems as tho I was beaten to it!

So chalk me up as another vote for #!

[Hundrakia]

I've yet to try #!. How is it comparable to Arch?

[Matt3o]

I've yet to try #!. How is it comparable to Arch?

in no way

[Hundrakia]

I've yet to try #!. How is it comparable to Arch?

in no way

/hits the goog hard

[pr0ximity]

I've yet to try #!. How is it comparable to Arch?

It's Debian, so apples vs. oranges.

[vimx]

XFCE is pretty good.   I'm A Fedora guy and like the XFCE spin.   It is light weight and a great alternative to the abomination that is Gnome 3.  I recently switched to Cinnamon, though, and may be hooked.   

[Vibex]

Gnome is my favourite DE, I use it when I use the touch screen on my laptop.
When I'm at my desk and using a keyboard as the main means of input, I use Herbstluftwm. By far my favourite manager, but can take a bit to setup. Totally worth it in the end though.

[jdcarpe]

XFCE is pretty good.   I'm A Fedora guy and like the XFCE spin.   It is light weight and a great alternative to the abomination that is Gnome 3.  I recently switched to Cinnamon, though, and may be hooked.   

I agree. I'm back on Xubuntu full time at home. It's great to have a classic looking DE now that Ubuntu switched to Unity and Gnome 3 is out.

I do like Openbox, though, so I may have to give Crunchbang a go on one of my systems.

[CSCoder4ever]

^ Crunchbang is great!

Anywho Openbox on my desktop ( Until I find a nice tiling WM I can use on a machine with 2+ monitors! ), and i3 on my laptop.

i3 is a cool WM imo... all the tiling-ness!

[cjhard]

I'll give a +1 to Awesome. It's quite fantastic, what with everything being a few lines of Lua away.

[SL89]

i want to try out Ratpoison, but i was reading it didn't jive too well with #!

does anyone have experience with it on anything else?

[Matt3o]

might be wrong but both XFCE and openbox seem rather dead (or at least extreeemely slow) projects

[vimx]

might be wrong but both XFCE and openbox seem rather dead (or at least extreeemely slow) projects

XFCE is not dead.  Check out the list of ready-to-go desktop options here:
http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora#desktops

With Fedora, you can install whatever one you like, and it is easy to switch by installing the package group for a specific desktop environment.  Then you get an extra pull-down option at login:  $ sudo yum group install cinnamon-desktop

Matt, I think you mentioned XBMC a while back.  I'm a huge fan and have been using it for year, and recently upgraded to the latest version.  So, that said, when using XBMC, the best option is to have no window manager AT ALL.  For my home theater pc, I have an htpc user that is auto logged in at boot, and that user has the "user script" option selected, meaning it looks for and runs the ~/.xsession file.  For XBMC, it has a single line in it:  /usr/bin/xbmc

And since this is a keyboard forum, check out the awesome Boxee remote that works out of the box:

[osi]

i want to try out Ratpoison, but i was reading it didn't jive too well with #!

does anyone have experience with it on anything else?

Only use rat poison if you have extremely lightweight hardware. It's godawful ugly :d

[Matt3o]

might be wrong but both XFCE and openbox seem rather dead (or at least extreeemely slow) projects

XFCE is not dead.  Check out the list of ready-to-go desktop options here:
http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora#desktops

With Fedora, you can install whatever one you like, and it is easy to switch by installing the package group for a specific desktop environment.  Then you get an extra pull-down option at login:  $ sudo yum group install cinnamon-desktop

Matt, I think you mentioned XBMC a while back.  I'm a huge fan and have been using it for year, and recently upgraded to the latest version.  So, that said, when using XBMC, the best option is to have no window manager AT ALL.  For my home theater pc, I have an htpc user that is auto logged in at boot, and that user has the "user script" option selected, meaning it looks for and runs the ~/.xsession file.  For XBMC, it has a single line in it:  /usr/bin/xbmc

And since this is a keyboard forum, check out the awesome Boxee remote that works out of the box:

My distro is Arch, I will never change that

that being said, can you buy the boxee remote separately?

[CSCoder4ever]

I'm going to confess that I am playing around with DWM on my laptop ( running Arch ), since why not?

now I'm more of a tiling WM hopper than a distro hopper )

[Matt3o]

if you have arch why would you want to change distro?

[Hypersphere]

Regarding distros, I started with RHEL, then went to CentOS, Ubuntu, and Mint. I also tried a number of others along the way, but in the end, Mint has proved to be the most reliable and easiest to maintain, both on my IBM server and on my client machines.

I mention CentOS, because up until version 7, this was one way to get true Gnome 2, which I really liked. But CentOS became too much of a headache, and for the past few years I have used Mint.

Because true Gnome 2 is no longer readily available, I have tried most of the other DEs (Gnome 3, Gnome fallback, Unity, KDE, Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce, and some WMs (WM, Awesome, xmonad, i3).

I used KDE for a while, but found it somewhat buggy and it used too many resources for some of my underpowered machines. I didn't like Unity or Gnome 3, didn't like Gnome fallback/flashback as much as the original Gnome 2, Cinnamon was too unstable, MATE was good but not quite to my liking. The various WMs were just a tad too minimalist for me. I have finally settled on Xfce. I like its clean, 2D look. Xfce does almost everything I want or need in a DE. The only thing that it doesn't do as well as I would like is handle multiple monitors. KDE is the supreme DE for handling multiple monitors -- doing things like having the primary monitor on the left and keeping desktop icons on my choice of monitor. However, the simplicity of Xfce is so good that I can get by without the complete multiple monitor management that I would prefer. And, yes, there is some compositing available in Xfce.

One note of caution about Xfce. I have tried it as an add-on in Ubuntu, and I have tried the Xubuntu implementation. I could never get it to look quite right. However, the Mint implementation of Xfce in the Xfce edition of Mint is superb -- it makes Xfce look great right out of the box, so to speak. Because of this, I use the Xfce edition of Mint, which is already tweaked just the way I like it.

[CSCoder4ever]

if you have arch why would you want to change distro?

Because I personally don't believe a hammer and nail will fix every problem 

Tis' why I have my top 3 ( Arch is one of them ) 

[Matt3o]

if you have arch why would you want to change distro?

Because I personally don't believe a hammer and nail will fix every problem 

Tis' why I have my top 3 ( Arch is one of them ) 

with lego you can do almost anything

[CSCoder4ever]

Bleeding edge is not always the answer though, even though it tends to be quite a bit of the time

[vimx]

Fedora is the base for and the next version of Red Hat.  Red Hat, and also CentOS, has enterprise support from major hardware vendors.  Step up, son, and go pro.