Linux desktop environment showdown

Normally, at the end of the year, I do my usual Linux distro showdown. But I have never really done a proper desktop environment comparison, regardless of which operating systems run them, even though in the Linux world, quite often, it is hard to separate the two. Well, it seems to me, this is a great opportunity to give you a comprehensive head-to-head clash between the leading desktop environments that bless our distros. So please do read, my fresh new Netrunner article, discussing the best interface for your boxen. Enjoy.

http://netrunner-mag.com/?p=2233


Cheers,
Mrk

 

nice!

tnx m8!

 

Very informative again - thanks .

 

I'm very new to Linux and the different environments. For all purposes, my experience is limited to trying various live images on flash drives using Yumi, trying to decide to start. For now, I've focused on Mint, the long term support version as a starting point. The last Yumi flash drive has 4 versions of Mint (Maya?), KDE, mate, cinnamon, and XFCE. On my hardware, XFCE easily outperforms the others. I never "updated" past XP, and even on that I used the classic settings and start menu. Never did like the look or feel of the "more modern" interface. For me, XFCE looks and feels familiar, enough so that I didn't feel lost when first seeing it. It behaves like I feel a desktop should. I've put XFCE Mint on a flash drive using UUI with a large persistence file and am getting used to working with it while I make room on my hard drive. IMO, XFCE looks and feels good and is a good choice for a user who is taking that first dive into Linux.

 

I have recently come to really like Xfce also. It's clean, minimalist, and functional. Mint 13 Xfce (and 14 as well), is very nicely done.... one of my favorites.... all the other environments are fine, but for me they have various issues. I guess I like KDE least of all.

 

Yep, my thoughts as well, Kerodo

 

I have come to like Pantheon Shell.

When paired with Nautilus, its the best implementation of Mac OSX on Linux. Light, fast and very user friendly!

 

The author is very negative towards Gnome 3. For me its a winner! Its simply the most elegent and beautiful DE around. There is nothing compared to Gnome 3 extensions where you can change every small thing/behaviour. One problem is they are still in beta..so these extensions can make your DE crash sometimes. Apart from this one drawback Gnome 3 is just plain awesome. Just my opinion though.

 

Cool. One day I have to try a live distro of Gnome 3 to see what all the fuss is about.

Anyone using Cinnamon 1.4 which is the version packaged with Mint Maya, should enable backports in Synaptic and upgrade it to 1.6.x.

The difference was remarkable. I found it much more fluid and responsive on nearly 4 year old hardware, more polished, more neat tricks you can have it do and perfectly compatible with the 12.04 base. Even the panel fonts I noticed were smoother. The Mint guys really have something special on their hands.

 

Currently I'm running Lxde. After reading your article, I might give Cinnamon a try.