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 feel Windows is more open and customizable than Gnome is.
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.)
Have you looked at Elementary OS? It bills itself as “The fast, open, and privacy-respecting replacement for Windows and macOS”
I’m not a huge fan of the idea of using a mass market UX on linux, but it has been around a while and seems to do a good job of it.
here is the first random comment I found on reddits sub:
I have been using for a long time and I super like the Os. I am mostly using Elementary for developing web sites etc. It works smooth and it is so basic system. So, no one needs to be tech savvy to be able to use Elementary. God bless the developers who created that. :) My pc is a laptop and it has i5 2 core processor + 10gb ram + intel hd 4400.
elementary is a step in the right direction, and I liked elementary OS. but since it is based on Ubuntu LTS, packages tend to be outdated. their DE, named Pantheon, is heavily tied to the distro, and I think pantheon in AUR is not so usable.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder… I love my i3+xfce combo: simple, powerful, stable and fast.
The guy who is working on Serpent is kinda a fraud tbh, and the best part about xfce is the customization you have, and what you can make it into. If I were you I’d try a WM.
Yeah, he just left Solus behind without even enabling other people to take over after him, and I think the donations that the project had gotten were also on one of his personal accounts, inaccessible to the other distro members (I don’t know, if by now he’s given the money to them).
Now he’s apparently stopped being burned out from distro making, but instead of returning to Solus, he’s marketing a new distro, as if it’s going to be the best thing since sliced bread.
Claiming that it’s “modern”, because it doesn’t do all kinds of things that other distros do. Which is exactly the same thing that all those other hundreds of distros are doing, which don’t have the resources of the big distros.I don’t like this marketing. If you’re open-source, you should convince by being good, even if it’s for a very specific use-case. Not by deceiving users that this distro is somehow better than others even though you really have nothing to show.
But what I especially dislike about his plans, is that I don’t see a significant difference to Solus. He didn’t have a sudden strike of genius for which he needs to build a new distro.
At best, he just wants to build a new project, because he’s bored of the old one and you should expect him to abandon this project, too. At worst, he’s just trying to make money from donations of people that are excited for his new project.oops! that’s discouraging. unix and fraud should not exist together!
