In my life, I have tried pretty much all the popular DEs that are generally known by Linux users. I don’t know any popular ones that I did not try, at some point. I see, that there are other DEs I did not use yet, but these are very niché and rare. Barely anyone knows them.
After all these years, I settled with KDE Plasma (NOT the old KDE, I hate the old KDE), because it changed from a bulky and really really ugly one to a beautiful and, in my personal view, lightweight desktop environment. It is lightweight enough to make it run easily on older devices, yet it does not miss any features, like previous “lightweight” desktop environments did, because they wanted to stay “lightweight” no matter the price.
I can give very short comments on the experiences I had with desktop environments. When reading them, please keep in mind the entire time, that I tested these desktop environments years ago, so they might’ve improved over time and fixed the issues I experienced a long time ago. Additionally, I didn’t test every single one to the full extent, as I sometimes only checked them out for a very brief amount of time and then dropped them rather quickly.
| DE | Short Comment |
|---|---|
| LXQt | Too lightweight. Super ugly, unstable and lacks features. |
| MATÉ | I had a lot of compatability trouble. Some things in the taskbar for example, simply did not work. |
| LXDE | I like the new one, like for example the one in Lubuntu. It’s pretty nice, because I don’t remember having any trouble with it. I used it, until I was shown KDE. |
| Cinnamon | This was the one I used right when Linux Mint has just become public enough for people to talk about it a lot and call it the “better Ubuntu”. I liked it back then, it was really nice, because it seemed lightweight and I didn’t experience trouble that I can remember. |
| XFCE | I used it when I started to get to know Linux. This was back then, when I just started to learn how to apt update, etc. It was enough in the beginning, but I quickly grew out of it. It looks really bad, really simple, in a bad way and has a couple of nice customization features, but by far not enough for a user like me. |
| GNOME | Back then, it was bulky, but it wasn’t as bad as many people try to portrait it as. It had (and perhaps still has) its place in the Linux world. No hate, but no love for it either. It’s fine. |
| Deepin | Beautiful. But some things just did not work. Updating through its package manager did not work, other simple tasks did not work, some settings did not work. Perhaps things changed, but back then it felt like an Alpha release of a desktop environment. All that said, this DE features the most beautiful terminal emulator I have ever seen. I already romanticised about it in another thread. Though, to be fair, I switched to guake in the end, because my laptop screen is so small, I am using a fullscreen terminal, all the time anyway. |
| KDE | The perfect mix of usability and lightweightness. It has many features, many extremely great home grown apps, like Kate and KDE Connect. It has an “Activities” feature and many more. It’s great for power users, who expect a lot of features from their desktop environment. Not all of them work perfectly right now, but the KDE is working on them, right as we speak. There are constant updates and improvements. Of all the desktop environments I dealt with, this one is by far the overall best. |
I probably tried a couple more niché DEs, but I don’t remember my experience with them anymore.