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I always look at blog posts like this and I always end up a bit disappointed when people go completely in the other direction with i3 and the like. What if I wa

I always look at blog posts like this and I always end up a bit disappointed when people go completely in the other direction with i3 and the like. What if I want customization and pretty animations with sane defaults? Surely there has to be some middle ground between "here's your empty screen and a keyboard shortcut to open the terminal, good luck" and "this minor release will redesign the entire interface and break all your custom themes and scripts, good luck" when it comes to open source desktops? Still, I'm glad people are getting out of closed ecosystems.

jcfrei 5y ago
I'm currently in the process of moving from Linux back to Windows running VMWare. For software development, I use a virtual xubuntu distribution. For browsing the web, listening to music, etc. it's all Windows. I just can't be bothered to fix broken drivers or wonky settings on Linux for stuff that should work out of the box. At the same time I still don't see an alternative for Linux as a development environment - so I hope with this new setup I get the best of both worlds.
- emptyparadise 5y ago
  I've actually had good luck with Linux when it comes to drivers, but I just can't pull off a good desktop setup. Looking at those rock-solid Debian servers just wishing I could have the desktop experience of a 15 year old PowerBook to go with them...
- genghizkhan 5y ago
  Why not try out WSL? I'm not a dev myself, but for the bit of coding and scripting I do from time to time WSL is pretty good.
  - The_Colonel 5y ago
    WSL2 is pretty bad in my experience. Networking is dark magic, filesystem access is fast only when working natively but GUI doesn't work on the linux side (without using X server which has glitches), there's no systemd, docker for windows does not work identically as native linux version ... In the end I just resigned and I'm using Linux in VirtualBox. Far from ideal but also much better than WSL2.
ByteJockey 5y ago
It sounds like you want XFCE. It's the boring option, but there's a lot of customization options and they've never broken anything I use.
xioxox 5y ago
KDE works pretty well for me. The defaults are not bad, but it has lots of customization options. I mostly leave it on defaults, except for switching on focus follows mouse. You don't need to manually edit config files. It also has some nice (optional) animations. It's like a nicer Windows, with more customization and a more uniform UI (no mixture of historical UI elements).
- neilalexander 5y ago
  Good grief, I wish I could agree. My experiences with KDE have been utterly horrible. Display scaling is flawed, the login screen keeps overlaying itself with a giant touch keyboard (I don't even have a touch device), my trash folder seems to end up read-only with alarming regularity, the application menu is twitchy and buggy, Konsole doesn't respect settings like unlimited scrollback properly, the System Settings is horribly laid out and crashes often (particularly when making network changes) and the people who designed KDE clearly have no concept whatsoever of whitespace (some menus are incredibly dense, other things like the application menu are huge with lots of wasted space). It feels like it was designed by programmers who know nothing about user experience. The Pantheon desktop from elementary, on the other hand, is far closer to "sane defaults" in my mind and seems to be much less buggy.
npteljes 5y ago
>customization and pretty animations with sane defaults I got my fix of this with KDE, namely with Kubuntu 20.04.

jcfrei 5y ago

I'm currently in the process of moving from Linux back to Windows running VMWare. For software development, I use a virtual xubuntu distribution. For browsing the web, listening to music, etc. it's all Windows. I just can't be bothered to fix broken drivers or wonky settings on Linux for stuff that should work out of the box. At the same time I still don't see an alternative for Linux as a development environment - so I hope with this new setup I get the best of both worlds.

emptyparadise 5y ago
I've actually had good luck with Linux when it comes to drivers, but I just can't pull off a good desktop setup. Looking at those rock-solid Debian servers just wishing I could have the desktop experience of a 15 year old PowerBook to go with them...
genghizkhan 5y ago
Why not try out WSL? I'm not a dev myself, but for the bit of coding and scripting I do from time to time WSL is pretty good.
- The_Colonel 5y ago
  WSL2 is pretty bad in my experience. Networking is dark magic, filesystem access is fast only when working natively but GUI doesn't work on the linux side (without using X server which has glitches), there's no systemd, docker for windows does not work identically as native linux version ... In the end I just resigned and I'm using Linux in VirtualBox. Far from ideal but also much better than WSL2.

ByteJockey 5y ago

It sounds like you want XFCE. It's the boring option, but there's a lot of customization options and they've never broken anything I use.

xioxox 5y ago

KDE works pretty well for me. The defaults are not bad, but it has lots of customization options. I mostly leave it on defaults, except for switching on focus follows mouse. You don't need to manually edit config files. It also has some nice (optional) animations. It's like a nicer Windows, with more customization and a more uniform UI (no mixture of historical UI elements).

neilalexander 5y ago
Good grief, I wish I could agree. My experiences with KDE have been utterly horrible. Display scaling is flawed, the login screen keeps overlaying itself with a giant touch keyboard (I don't even have a touch device), my trash folder seems to end up read-only with alarming regularity, the application menu is twitchy and buggy, Konsole doesn't respect settings like unlimited scrollback properly, the System Settings is horribly laid out and crashes often (particularly when making network changes) and the people who designed KDE clearly have no concept whatsoever of whitespace (some menus are incredibly dense, other things like the application menu are huge with lots of wasted space). It feels like it was designed by programmers who know nothing about user experience. The Pantheon desktop from elementary, on the other hand, is far closer to "sane defaults" in my mind and seems to be much less buggy.

npteljes 5y ago

>customization and pretty animations with sane defaults I got my fix of this with KDE, namely with Kubuntu 20.04.