I use different environments on my 3 main PCs: Unity, XFCE and windowmaker. Doesn't actually make so much of a difference for what I'm doing: mostly terminals and firefox.
I use KDE because I like my desktop set up the way I like it, not the way some developers think I should. (also Yakuake's, KDE terminal emulator, "Open window when the mouse pointer touches the screen edge" has become such a second nature to me that I keep shoving the mouse to the top of the screen even if I'm on someone else's machine)
Also, KDE has kickass support for multi-monitor setups and works and looks the best on big resolutions. This, and the possibility to configure the DE the way I want are the two most important reasons why I love KDE.
...until you try placing a vertical panel on an a desktop edge adiacent to another monitor ...an trying to find wtf is happening, you discover the developers will never fix it because they don;t consider it a bug, it's just the standard behavior of some component down the wm stack ...freakin awesome
While it is relevant due to the similarities of shells available, BSD is not Linux. I can see how someone might see it as the same as saying, "I don't use Linux. I use Windows with the default shell.". That is not relevant.
Yes. For this particular case, we don't care about what's under the hood (BSD or any Linux distro), but about the hood itself, which doesn't depend on the OS as long as it is Linux or a BSD.
For those who wish to try before they buy (into) a tiling window manager, the repository dwm/suckless-tools work fine on Ubuntu 12.04 so you can log into a DWM session, and log out again using Shift-Alt-q. If you like the experience, you will need to uninstall the stock repository dwm binary and compile a replacement from source as the configuration is in a c header file.
Ditto. For me, however, the performance benefits of going fairly minimal are kinda secondary to the productivity benefits of choosing tools that stay the hell out of my way.
While there's a lot to like about dwm (I rather like its tag concept as a replacement for workspaces, for instance), I find it a bit limiting for my purposes. Spectrwm is another good one, and it gets too little attention. Xmonad is pretty good. For floating rather than tiling window managers, I think AHWM is pretty awesome, though it has been abandoned for years; it could stand to be picked up by a new maintainer.
I ended up with i3, though; it's tiling with decent functionality, including its native support for tabbing windows. It used to be better, actually, in that it was easier to mix and match different window arrangement styles within a single workspace, but even after making that marginally less usable it still does more in that regard than other WMs I've tried out.
Saying that Qt is sane sounds kind of flame bait. If you need own custom preprocessor which is bolted on "some" compiler to be able to build your GUI.. well I prefer something else. Like GTK.
Hey! At least QT based desktops can run over a not accelerated or buggier graphics driver and I t will work without slugines or graphical artefacts. The last time that I try Gnome 3(on Debian 7), it keeps eating 90% of the characters in the screen !
I'm using the Gnome 3.6 fallback mode. My main workstation has 4,000 sq cm of display across two monitors. I have found a taskbar is the least worst way of dealing with lots of windows, especially if there are multiple ones from the same app. It is important that the taskbar allow reordering and hover to raise (eg for drag and drop). Being horizontal also means that mouse travel distance isn't too far even from the furthest points - a problem for desktops that focus on the top left corner.
I've repeatedly tried Gnome 3 shell and even the 3.8 classic mode. They always fail due to not having a functional taskbar. Notifications are also completely messed up - I can't figure out why you would want them hidden! Most bizarre are things like the system monitor being in the hidden notification area - in what way does that make any sense?
I've tried other environments and just didn't like them - eg KDE (too busy), LXDE (too spartan), Cinnamon (I like other Gnome 3 advancements).
What's the goal of polls such as these? If someone is wants a DE recommendation then popularity probably isn't the best metric. If not, you might as well be asking what our favorite colors are (the answer is of course orange on white).
I think it's useful also for the DE developers... even if these results are from a small population, it's surely less biased than doing a poll from a blog post appearing on planet.{ubuntu|debian|gentoo|etc}.org or similar places
I use herbstluftwm, a manual tilling manager similar to i3 and wmii. I don't have a reason to use this over other tilling managers, because I haven't used them enough to compare.
I prefer manual tiling managers because it is easier to create usable layouts.
I generally have two different Linux installs on each of my computers: A Gentoo + XMonad environment for development, and a Debian + KDE environment for anything else (other school work, movies, word processing, etc).
Played with gnome, KDE, awesome, fluxbox, blackbox.. but I've been using stumpwm for the last couple years. I can't go back to anything else without feeling a lack of control. Similar feeling I have when I use a Windows machine.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadyou should probably add options for awesome/xmonad, those are fairly popular in some circles.
I used to use ion until the author got wacky with the license. Too bad about that.
So I guess Openbox
+1
...until you try placing a vertical panel on an a desktop edge adiacent to another monitor ...an trying to find wtf is happening, you discover the developers will never fix it because they don;t consider it a bug, it's just the standard behavior of some component down the wm stack ...freakin awesome
For a full featured desktop it is great.
I've run the gamut, from GNOME, to Xfce4, to LXDE, etc...
They all have too much extraneous software.
I'd much rather build a system up, rather than tear it down, in my quest to squeeze as much performance out of my netbook as I can.
For me it's not about resource consumption, but rather, the plain suck factor (of Gnome 3)
Ditto. For me, however, the performance benefits of going fairly minimal are kinda secondary to the productivity benefits of choosing tools that stay the hell out of my way.
While there's a lot to like about dwm (I rather like its tag concept as a replacement for workspaces, for instance), I find it a bit limiting for my purposes. Spectrwm is another good one, and it gets too little attention. Xmonad is pretty good. For floating rather than tiling window managers, I think AHWM is pretty awesome, though it has been abandoned for years; it could stand to be picked up by a new maintainer.
I ended up with i3, though; it's tiling with decent functionality, including its native support for tabbing windows. It used to be better, actually, in that it was easier to mix and match different window arrangement styles within a single workspace, but even after making that marginally less usable it still does more in that regard than other WMs I've tried out.
p.s. "Gnome 3.x Shell" option should be down vote only ;-)
I've repeatedly tried Gnome 3 shell and even the 3.8 classic mode. They always fail due to not having a functional taskbar. Notifications are also completely messed up - I can't figure out why you would want them hidden! Most bizarre are things like the system monitor being in the hidden notification area - in what way does that make any sense?
I've tried other environments and just didn't like them - eg KDE (too busy), LXDE (too spartan), Cinnamon (I like other Gnome 3 advancements).
I prefer manual tiling managers because it is easier to create usable layouts.
.. + urxvt + vim
I generally have two different Linux installs on each of my computers: A Gentoo + XMonad environment for development, and a Debian + KDE environment for anything else (other school work, movies, word processing, etc).