Dull Men's Club
An unofficial chapter of the popular Dull Men's Club.
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I went default with debian 13. Spent 10 minutes trying to figure out why I had no desktop then discovered DEs :).
Thinking xfce. Do you have any other recommendations?
The way I always heard it described (with the default setup) for the most popular DE's:
There a lot of others like LXQT, options that are not the "usual" Desktop Environment e.g. tiling window managers like Hyprland.
A lot of these can be installed in parallel and you can then choose which to start on the login manager, if you want to experiment which you like more.
There is also the choice of display protocol (X11 or Wayland), with X11 being the older more widely supported option. Not all DE's will work on Wayland.
I have two notes.
If you want a fancy tiling manager I would recommend Niri + Noctalia. Hyperland is run by a right wing chud who was such a chud he was banned from the free desktop foundation for being such a chud. The dude is a 4chan type who thinks he/him is normal and she/her is political to the point where the admins overwrote people’s profile pronouns to who/cares.
As for x11 vs wayland i would strongly recommend picking wayland. Its the default on all mainstream Linux distros now days and is massively more secure.
Under X11 any application can just keylog and screen record your whole desktop no questions asked. With Wayland apps need permission to do things like record your screen or intercept keystrokes.
3-4 years ago there where some reasons to not use Wayland . But nowadays these major issues have been resolved. That and those specific x11 desktops tend to have Wayland versions that by coincidence generally speaking have more active communities. (i.e. i3 vs the Wayland equivalent sway)
I dunno why people say gnome can’t be customized. It has a whole plugin system. There’s a lot you can do.
Never said that it can't be customised.
From my experience it is just not build in by default and not quite as easy.
But that was also years ago, so I am by no means a good source here.
I have xfce, it's good. If you always thought Windows widgets were dumb and want your desktop to be your desktop, I hear it's the way to go. If you think your desktop should be all widgets though, use kde, right?
How powerful is your rig? If it’s reasonable and not 1k years old, you could go with any. I’m quite partial to cosmic, but kde is also good. If you feel like tinkering, gnome can be made usable with extensions.
But yeah, cosmic is great. Xfce is good for low end rigs.