What's the best Linux desktop environment?

I would have voted for LXDE. Given the psychotic changes from KDE and Gnome, more people are choosing to use something else.

I would have voted for LXDE, too. I was a long time user of KDE3. Jumped ship with KDE4. On 4 desktops, two run LXDE, and the other two run Openbox. They're all I need.

I'm not surprised they missed my favorite - Enlightenment (it is still not widely enough used), but to miss both LXDE and XFCE seems silly and wrong. They are both used by many distros/users.

~Jeff

GNU Screen.

I'm an Xfce user and have been for years.

Psychotic changes? Really? Hate to say this, but I like KDE4 quite a lot nowadays. It's what I recommend to Windows refugees. It's just a little too resource hungry for my tastes but it's matured into a very nice desktop. Just because you don't like something doesn't make it "psychotic". Geez.

But is KDE 4.7 stable? I'm using it on OpenSUSE 12.1, and I get regular Plasma crashes and other KDE component crashes, and sometimes strange graphical artifacts. It's not a big problem, but it gives a general impression of instability. I can't tell whether it's because of my computer, my graphics card driver or whether it could be a result of the computer suspending when I close the lid. Suspend/resume works, but I have a feeling it makes my computer weird after some repetitions.

KDE on Pardus is stable. KDE on Slackware is stable. KDE on openSUSE has been less than stable for a number of releases now. I nearly got pilloried when I said it in a review sometime back but the problem seems to be the openSUSE implementations of various versions of KDE, not KDE itself.

Yeah, I'm good with psychotic. It fits. Though KDE 4 has finally settled into something pretty nice, with a few lingering oddities. Desktop KDE, smartphone/tablet KDE, and semantic search, which many of you deride, but it is an area of genuine innovation. You think you'll never use it-- but I bet money you will.

Quoting:But is KDE 4.7 stable?

I am running Kubuntu with KDE 4.7.4. I do get those occasional Plasma/app crashes, but they never make any part of the DE dysfunctional. All it does is display a msg asking to send any debug information to the developers. I am not sure how it recovers, but I believe Plasma component is sort of independent and it is restarted automatically. Otherwise, in my opinion, KDE 4.x is way far ahead of any other Free or commercial DE even though some of its advanced feature are still in development stage.

All in all, that was a pretty nice article. Lots of information on usability testing.

It is a good article, Steven. Mayank Sharma always cranks out good stuff.

Quoting:It is a good article...

And Thank you Fettoosh for posting it. :-), :-)

@Fettoosh, I tried the hack you suggested, at least I think was you, and yes it does stop the icons on that damn places panel from resizing.

The places panel is still there in the Open/Save/Save As dialogue, and you can't use the hack there, but so long as one remembers never to resize the panels one can ignore it.

Having gotten past that point I discovered one new problem I wasn't aware of before. I can't control the displaying of the desktop wall (which displays all the virtual desktops) with my mouse. In fact all of the actions that I can perform by moving my mouse to a screen position require that I use a CRTL + Key combination, which of course I don't want. Is there a way around this so that I can use my mouse to perform those actions?

Quoting:but so long as one remembers never to resize the panels one can ignore it.

You should be able to resize the panels horizontally and the icons will stay the same. the icons will resize when there is vertical space.

Quoting:I can't control the displaying of the desktop wall...

On my desktop, I have six virtual desktops. I summon them by pushing the cursor against the middle of the screen right edge, where I have defined a hot spot. Then I click on the window I need to switch to. In order to do this here what you need to do.

1. Make sure you have "Desktop Special Effects" is activated. You do that by going to "System Settings" => In "General" tab under Activation, make sure "Enable desktop Effects at startup" is selected. Note how to dynamically turn it on & off (Default is Alt+Shift+F12) which you can change.

2. Next go back to "System Settings" Overview. Under "Workspace Appearance and Behavior", Select Workspace Behavior". Then select "Screen Edges". Left Click the hot spot you want and select "Desktop Grid", close "System settings"

Either you restart KDE to check if it gets set automatically or use the key shortcut above. It should work with no problems.

Let me know how it goes.

[Edited:]

One other nice feature is to define another hotspot to present all windows with open applications. You can do that the same way as item (2) above but selecting "Present Windows -All Desktop" instead of "Desktop Grid"

.

@TA,

One more thought. If you are still not comfortable with Dolphin, why don't you try Konqueror? It is still available and I prefer it over Dolphin for many reasons but especially splitting any window horizontally and vertically to view and compare documents, web pages and directory listings. If you haven't used it before, give it a try.

I prefer Konqueror to Dolphin, I loved Konqueror when I was a KDE user.

Quoting: but so long as one remembers never to resize the panels one can ignore it.



You should be able to resize the panels horizontally and the icons will stay the same. the icons will resize when there is vertical space.

You missed that I was talking about the Open/Save/Save as dialogue.

Quoting:You missed that I was talking about the Open/Save/Save as dialogue

Yes I did, Sorry.

I don't know if it would do any good, but I will send a request to some body at KDE to make resizing configurable like the icons in the other panels. I might as well ask if auto-sizing has any merit.

Quoting: Quoting:It is a good article...



And Thank you Fettoosh for posting it. :-), :-)

In my own words. Thank You Fettoosh.

;)

There is no "best Linux desktop environment". It's a completely subjective argument. Different people prefer different things. Madness is arguing "I hate it therefore it sucks".