I admire Linux kernel, but not satisfied with most DE’s. Currently, I am settled with Budgie on Manjaro. KDE is powerful, but has unsuitable defaults and should have been named Tinker Desktop Environment. OOTH, I feel Windows is more open and customizable than Gnome is.
Xfce and LXQt are great but need serious modernization. The whole Linux GUI world needs modernization and beautification. So, right now, Budgie DE seems like the best of all worlds to me.
Considering Budgie is planning to adopt Qt and that the ex-Solus dev is spearheading in creating a “Modern” distro called Serpent OS, I am truly looking forward to a QtBudgie experience on Serpent OS.
Just a bit of thought as my first post on lemmy!
I think, you should feel again. It often escapes me, too, how uncustomizable Windows is. For instance, you can’t even change the keyboard shortcuts.
And with GNOME, there’s customizability there, but it’s often hard to find, because you need the GNOME Tweak Tools or to install an extension.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s good. I’m the Tinker Desktop guy, so GNOME is wholly unsuitable for me, but there’s more there than you expect or see at first glance.
Having said that, you might also like Cinnamon. It’s also a GNOME fork, like Budgie, and it’s also a bit more open. It works a lot like Windows, though, so if you didn’t like the KDE defaults, you might not like this too much either.
As for LXQt, you can actually make it look a lot like KDE Plasma. It’s not going to be polished down to exact pixel-sizes and there’s still no fancy effects when you start interacting with it, but well, the latter is also kind of not what it’s trying to be. It wants to be specifically lightweight and a lot of what’s “modern” is not lightweight.
you’re correct on all other points - except gnome vs windows. it is possible to create hotkeys in windows, at least, I can move the taskbar to either side to save some vertical pixels. gnome extensions are version-specific.
gnome is so buried in their “philosophy” that “desktop customization” to one’s liking is strictly a no-no. and they completely disregard small screen users like me: no global menu, can not (i think) hide or move the top bar without extensions, and hiding application window like KWin can is unthinkable.
I like the power of KDE, I have a separate user account in my laptop that I use to log in to plasma and tinker with KDE, but what I don’t like about KDE is that I need to spend a lot of time to make it look good, and there are tons of options on every mouse click. KDE combines usage mode and customize mode together. that ends up making user experience cluttered.
but budgie appears to provide a stable DE with all good defaults with some customizability. for example, I am saving some pixels: https://i.imgur.com/bgfWmmD.png
You can create hotkeys in Windows, but you can’t for example rebind Alt+F4. Or the shortcut for minimizing a window (I’m not sure, if they even have one for that).
And yeah, if you want to move the panel, GNOME is relatively unflexible in that. They are more customizable in other regards. I guess, it always depends on what you’re trying to do.
Same deal with KDE. I like its default look. I change the panel colours and that’s basically it. (I do have a more involved workflow setup, but no other desktop offers my preferred workflow, so I can’t exactly complain about the defaults here.)