Cinnamon is my favorite. KDE is #2. Not crazy about Gnome or Cosmic.
this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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niri forever
Did anyone only just realise the smoking man in the background
I would love to give GNOME an honest try, but there are so many ways in which it feels like it's actively working against me. In KDE I can for example create as many panels as I want on as many monitors as I want. On GNOME? There's an extension to put the panel on another monitor, but then you can't use the dock. I guess the GNOME developers don't use multiple monitors? I mean you can't even set different wallpapers on different monitors without a third party application.
As for Niri, Hyprland and all that... Yeah, they're cool, but I'm too old nowadays. I just want shit to work, even though I do miss some of the functions that exist e.g. on Hyprland that doesn't exist in KDE. But on the other hand, the developer of Hyprland is an asshole, so I wouldn't really want to promote or use the project anyway.
I'm waiting for Cosmic to mature
I tried Cosmic for a week. It looked nice but I returned to LXQt because I want:
- To display time in ISO 8601 without also messing with locales
- To customize my file manager columns
- To use Emacs in a terminal emulator
- To not have my windows scattered to the four winds every time I lock my screen because the fancy window tiling feature is half-baked
- To have the X window manager back. I'm sure some people with use cases besides mine that are compatible only with Wayland, but I simply don't see the need nor do I wish to be a guinea pig submitting bug reports when so many guinea pigs before me had years of their lives sacrificed polishing X.
Also, the performance of programs like the default Cosmic file manager was much slower then comparable alternatives like pcmanfm-qt which I know run fast even on 2005 Compaq laptop hardware.
It has so many great ideas, all it needs is time and polish.
Plasma is great. But it's missing an important feature. Apps, such as backup or sync, cannot navigate to network shares, to use as a backup target. Dolphin sees the shares ok, but its important to backup. Windows lets apps select network targets. Plasma should too.
Dolphin shows you places that are not in your file system, such as network shares or your phone‘s media directory. Those are fake files, illusions of Satan, temptations designed to stray you from the path of God. Avoid anything that is not opened with open and not read with read system calls, for doing so is a sin before eyes of God (fopen and fread are permitted). Mount your network shares using sudo mount -t cifs.
hear me out. what do you do when the network share server is not always available? like because your system is a laptop, or because you are doing maintenance on your server and its off.
what I do is suffer the consequences of many software that does not handle it well, and freeze for a minute (or worse) when it tries to open the mounted share even when it shouldn't even try. multiple KDE apps are guilty of that, including dolphin and kate, but to some extent almost everything else too.
but that is not ideal.
It's a shame Dolphin gets it wrong. I hope that bug has been reported. And I'd love to find a way for non IT users to mount the share as a workaround to the missing functionality. But that's missing too.
Dolphin does mount it ...somewhere. Supposedly. I expect only KDE developers know where exactly.
You can get the same functionality using Gnome file manager and gio command, and you get your network share properly mounted in a file system, but then you won't be using KDE.
I use Nixos, but my ssh mount and nfs and samba mount can be selected as backup path for kup.
Nice. Kup actually lets me see the Network. But then complains if I select a samba share. There is a popular bug report about this. I prefer sync backup to access documents directly, instead of kups scrambled backup files.
What do you use for backup?
Kup currently also does not satisfy my needs, but I am not sure what else I should use.
I've enjoyed KDE since Mandrake 6. The control you get to have as a user is amazing. Thought to be honest, I really change very little. But the Cube! I will die for that Cube.
But I have used probably every DE that runs on Linux one time or another. Each has its own charms and quirks. While my laptop lives comfortably with Fedora 43 Kinonite, the cheap mini desktop I'm using right now currently has COSMIC on it. And to be honest, as much as I like LXDE, dnfdragoria as it's package manager, someone at Fedora needs to take dnfdragoria out back and launch it into the sun. COMIC is far lighter feeling than I thought would be. I will live with it for a while I think.
Gnome has the cube now. I prefer gnome, so this was a wonderful surprise.
Reminds me of the old compiz days, beautiful stuff
Cinnamon situation currently on arch feels such that it might break at any time, and in fact has recently. :-( I have absolutely loved the simplicity this DE, but the breakages lately are worrisome. I'm considering migrating from cinnamon to plasma, but the added cruft that comes with the Plasma DE does not impress me. There is some tension; I have contributed to KDE projects, and I prefer KDE apps over gnome/GTK.
How well does plasma wayland tolerate unresponsive apps? I need to be able to keep graphical apps in this state for possibly an hour at time, as I run them under a debugger.
I think due to Cinnamon being the DE for Mint, they might be feeling some issues with their transition to Wayland. I know I switched from Fedora Cinnamon to Fedora Budgie for a bit because things got frustrating when they started the switch. I'm using Fedora COMIC right now. It seems pretty decent.
the first DE I used on Linux was cinnamon and I was like “wow, this is great, everything makes sense to me out of the box”
And then I tried Gnome and was incredibly put off by it, like “why the hell is this over here, this layout is strange to me. Why are all these unconventional features on by default, this is very annoying.”
And then I tried KDE and I was like “wow, this is great and everything makes sense to me out of the box, also there’s all these features and options, I don’t know what they do, but i don’t have to interact with them if I don’t want to.”
I went from Gnome 2 to Mate, and switched to Plasma last year. Can't see myself moving away anytime soon XD
KDE's absolutely excellent, but if you need every little kilobyte RAM, go Sway. Sway—It's Technically Graphical ™
Try danklinux.com for an easy Niri install. Thank me later.
Wait. It is like hyperland but with a control panel so you dont really miss anything like changing control mouse speed screen resolution etc.
This looks interesting. Today i use plasma and kanata to get a good environment that is close to tiling
i have tried kde and i cannot understand how so many people love it and hate gnome
Gnome 3 abruptly removed app icons from the desktop moved taskbar to the top of the screen, and broke Alt-Tab. That’s why prople hate Gnome and love KDE, because KDE did not break these features.
It's not that I "hate" Gnome, I still love Gnome 2 and Cinnamon by extension, but the workflow of Gnome 3 just sucks balls for me. I can tolerate the workflow of any other DE, but Gnome 3 is just right out.
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