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Can someone please tell me what I should use then, if I just want a memory efficient, aesthetically pleasing, no-fuss experience (coming from mac OS)? KDE? It

Can someone please tell me what I should use then, if I just want a memory efficient, aesthetically pleasing, no-fuss experience (coming from mac OS)? KDE? It has issues too, but I wonder if they're as severe. Heavily customized GNOME? It's possible, but that's extra work [0]. As much as I love to tweak my i3 config and enjoy trying to be keyboard-only as much as possible, I'm not enough of a poweruser to justify it and the cognitive overhead just slows me down. (I believe Apple came to this conclusion decades ago, too.) I just want to point, click, get work done without bugs or crashes. [0] See e.g. https://gist.github.com/eh8/38fc8240ce4c8fd2e0ae065410045cd5 https://gist.github.com/eh8/38fc8240ce4c8fd2e0ae065410045cd5

zaptheimpaler 6y ago
nothing on Linux comes close to Mac. elementary OS looks pretty good though
- ACow_Adonis 6y ago
  Is this a technical opinion backed up by facts, or merely an aesthetic one? We've got three OS's in our house, and honestly, apart from individually subjective things such as whether and where you want a dock, I don't feel the display manager or aesthetics are inherently any better or worse under my Ubuntu Desktop than Mac OS. Honestly though, I'd say the same for windows 10. The truth is for the last 5 years or so we seem to be yo-yoing around in some local minimum of GUI interfaces. I can't honestly put my hand on my heart and rate any of them over any of the others in terms of user experience.
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    I love Ubuntu and it's the only tolerable desktop Linux that let's me get something done instead of constantly fixing the OS and searching for workarounds. But even Ubuntu and Gnome have frequent glitches. They are minor annoyances that I can't even list well. Stuff like an icon would get stuck to the mouse cursor and I have to lock the screen and unlock again to fix it. Or I'd get light text on light background in the context menu. Or the font gets messed up randomly. Or alt tab works weirdly (yes I searched and fiddled with it, it's still not how I expect it). Many more small things. I should make a list but then again, I'm trying to get stuff done, no to compile meticulous bug reports.
  - zaptheimpaler 6y ago
    > Is this a technical opinion backed up by facts, or merely an aesthetic one? Merely aesthetics, but aesthetics matter :)
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    It goes beyond that what the eyes can see, the way how everything is integrated also counts, specially on the developer experience of OS frameworks and how most applications make use of OS IPC capabilities.
modzu 6y ago
coming from macos and wanting something low fuss, gnome with a few settings (ex dock enabled) should be pretty close
dsissitka 6y ago
If you like i3 but you want something a little more hands off you might like Pop Shell. With some minor config [0] it feels a bit like some combination of GNOME, bspwm, and i3. They recently added i3 style tabs. [1] [0] https://gist.github.com/dsissitka/14995165a51524486f2385df66891983 https://gist.github.com/dsissitka/14995165a51524486f2385df66... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TSdFWY_U9A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TSdFWY_U9A
blihp 6y ago
If you want minimal tweaking, I think you're pretty much constrained to Gnome and/or KDE as those are the two desktop ecosystems on Linux. Just install both and switch between them for a while until you decide which one is for you... most applications won't care which they're running under. FYI, a lot of the dislike for the current Gnome comes from remembering what it used to be in the Gnome 2 days. You have no such history so maybe it'll be fine for you.
shadowofneptune 6y ago
What I can recommend against is heavily modifying GNOME 3. The extension system tends to break with major updates.
scns 6y ago
I would recommend checking out Cinnamon on Linux Mint (Ubuntu based with Flatpak instead of Snaps). Prettier than KDE IMHO and pretty nice to use via keyboard. It includes useful apps developed by the mint team, like timeshift for backups and they package chromium themselves. [edit: add more features]

zaptheimpaler 6y ago

nothing on Linux comes close to Mac. elementary OS looks pretty good though

ACow_Adonis 6y ago
Is this a technical opinion backed up by facts, or merely an aesthetic one? We've got three OS's in our house, and honestly, apart from individually subjective things such as whether and where you want a dock, I don't feel the display manager or aesthetics are inherently any better or worse under my Ubuntu Desktop than Mac OS. Honestly though, I'd say the same for windows 10. The truth is for the last 5 years or so we seem to be yo-yoing around in some local minimum of GUI interfaces. I can't honestly put my hand on my heart and rate any of them over any of the others in terms of user experience.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  I love Ubuntu and it's the only tolerable desktop Linux that let's me get something done instead of constantly fixing the OS and searching for workarounds. But even Ubuntu and Gnome have frequent glitches. They are minor annoyances that I can't even list well. Stuff like an icon would get stuck to the mouse cursor and I have to lock the screen and unlock again to fix it. Or I'd get light text on light background in the context menu. Or the font gets messed up randomly. Or alt tab works weirdly (yes I searched and fiddled with it, it's still not how I expect it). Many more small things. I should make a list but then again, I'm trying to get stuff done, no to compile meticulous bug reports.
- zaptheimpaler 6y ago
  > Is this a technical opinion backed up by facts, or merely an aesthetic one? Merely aesthetics, but aesthetics matter :)
- pjmlp 6y ago
  It goes beyond that what the eyes can see, the way how everything is integrated also counts, specially on the developer experience of OS frameworks and how most applications make use of OS IPC capabilities.

modzu 6y ago

coming from macos and wanting something low fuss, gnome with a few settings (ex dock enabled) should be pretty close

dsissitka 6y ago

If you like i3 but you want something a little more hands off you might like Pop Shell. With some minor config [0] it feels a bit like some combination of GNOME, bspwm, and i3. They recently added i3 style tabs. [1] [0] https://gist.github.com/dsissitka/14995165a51524486f2385df66891983 https://gist.github.com/dsissitka/14995165a51524486f2385df66... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TSdFWY_U9A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TSdFWY_U9A

blihp 6y ago

If you want minimal tweaking, I think you're pretty much constrained to Gnome and/or KDE as those are the two desktop ecosystems on Linux. Just install both and switch between them for a while until you decide which one is for you... most applications won't care which they're running under. FYI, a lot of the dislike for the current Gnome comes from remembering what it used to be in the Gnome 2 days. You have no such history so maybe it'll be fine for you.

shadowofneptune 6y ago

What I can recommend against is heavily modifying GNOME 3. The extension system tends to break with major updates.

scns 6y ago

I would recommend checking out Cinnamon on Linux Mint (Ubuntu based with Flatpak instead of Snaps). Prettier than KDE IMHO and pretty nice to use via keyboard. It includes useful apps developed by the mint team, like timeshift for backups and they package chromium themselves. [edit: add more features]