Favorite Desktop Environment on Linux?

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Probably a reoccurring discussion but whats your favorite Desktop Environment?

I just installed KDE on Arch Linux and after fighting with conky for a few hours I am very comfortable with this setup, I like it more than I thought I would.

I give it a 8/10

Every time I get (enough) new hardware in our home, or perform a major upgrade, I try out the top few latest & greatest desktop environments (& sometimes windows managers if something new is out there). And almost every time I've ended up back at XFCE/XFwm. I want to get stuff done, not look at the pretty & I tend to build somewhat minimalist systems for my own use. That's not to disparage anyone who can appreciate nicer environments, I just don't seem to get much out of it. The problem, I think, is that I grew up in a CLI environment & first learned Linux around the time of Windows 3.11/WFWG. I apparently have absolutely no patience to wait for interrupted screen draws, animated menus & 3-d desktop rotations, etc...kinda wish I did sometimes.

My favorites are KDE and Xfce.

I used KDE pretty much exclusively during my Red Hat days (5.1+). Don't remember what I used before that, as my distro of choice was Slackware. Probably something mind-numbingly basic like fvwm. I'll be building out a system this weekend, it just might be time to revisit my old friend (KDE)...

Here is my new Desktop ya'll lol

Conky is a work in progress but everything works at least, I would like for the CPU under resources to show all eight cores and to have the load and process list on another category list. I see how to do it in the .conkyrc file I found on the internet but I am lazy and skyrim, mostly skyrim.

May I ask your system specs? They seem really interesting.

I suppose I must have started with KDE (or whatever it was under RHEL 6.X 'Bluecurve") although my first computer was DOS 2.0 so I like glitzy desktop GUIs but I've grown to need a good way of always bouncing back to CLI; before I dropped Ubuntu over Unity I used it for a year or so on Gnome 3 atop Xubuntu so I had XFCE as a fallback. Before Ubuntu dropped Gnome I loved Compiz Fusion. Xubuntu is my Debian go-to since I've spent so much more time in RHEL but I'll eventually get around to supplanting it with something like Arch, Mint or Elementary if I see reason to dedicate a boot volume to the spiral.

If I'm honest I don't really need much of anything more than Ncurses but that's a forgone conclusion; it's great to show people something they thought was so dry can be beautiful.

Yeah no problem, they are a bit mismatched but the hardware was the best I could get cheap in each category. The 32 Gbs of ram is probably what has caught your eye and while it did seem like over kill at the time its actually come in handy with the type of emulation I have been doing. Anyway enough about how mismatched it is, you can make your own judgement.

AMD FX8350 4 Ghz (Can be overclocked to 4.6 but runs hot)
Asus Crosshair V Formula-Z Motherboard
32 GBs of DDR3 Ram
Nvidia Geforce 980 GTX
1 TB hard drive
DVD/CD/Blu-Ray Reader/Burner
Corsair AX1200i 1200 Watt PSU

I think the weakest thing on here is the processor but its not too noticeable and the best AMD really has to offer and it supports the kind of advance virtualization I need (AMD-Vi). PSU is over kill but again, got most of the parts for a killer deal so I figured I'll just use it on my next rig if I can.

That's cool. You could get a SSD to enhance your experience. I really like my SSD + HDD combo. I also run many VMs, mostly for school projects.

i7 5820k 3.3Ghz overclocked to 4.5 (can do 4.9 but unnecessary and runs way too hot even with water cooling given the voltage required to get it stable)
Asus X99-A/USB 3.1
16GB DDR4 G Skill Ripjaws 4 2400Mhz(can be overclocked to 2800Mhz but no real world benefits)
MSI GTX 970 overclocked to 1560Mhz
120GB Intel SSD + 3TB Seagate HDD

Very happy with it so far, waiting for Pascal for more awesomeness .

Nice rig, IMO it's a keeper.

That 32Gb is very much *not* mismatched if you are running vm's! Even with shared/compressed ram, it's still best to have as much physical memory as you can or the host will have to swap, and then you'll take a huge disk I/O hit. That PSU is also very nice - I see it this way; the more headroom a PS has, the more stable it'll hold voltages under load.

Have you considered liquid cooling, btw? The extra 0.6ghz * 8 cores just might be worth it.

I'd say I couldn't bring myself to build so much rig without a Corsair radiator. For my CG purposes I'll be needing a Xeon eventually & I'll be buying it unlocked. What perks are there for hypervisoring on AMD these days?

None that I'm aware of, verses Intel anyway. Both Intel VTx & AMD-Vx offer connectivity and/or I/O virtualization in their respective chipsets & that's really the key to maximizing performance. But almost as important is to analyze what you'll be using it for and match the application/OS/usage to the platform if one is a better match (ie AMD introduces some enhancement that your hypervisor of choice may or may not be capable of utilizing). I've not looked into it recently, but two years ago Intel had interrupt virtualization in the pipeline while AMD did not. They also announced hardware graphics virtualization, which could be *very* interesting but I've seen little about it since.

If I ever find the photo of my first liquid cooled system, I'll scan and post it. It used the heater core from a 1979 VW Rabbit & a vending machine pump, IIR. I think it was a dual P3-866. It suffered an early death due to a particularly spectacular fluid leak. This was in the early days of such things.

Last edited by Edenthiel on 01 Jan 2016, 5:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

How is that different that what I am doing on my current rig which is PCI Passthrough?

But alas Edenthiel is right, AMD doesn't offer much of anything that Intel doesn't do. The reason I went AMD is because of cost, the FX is a fast chip for the money. Its at least on par with a decent i5 processor in my opinion though haters claim its like a weak i3. Honestly I think it depends on what you are trying to do. Applications that require a high number of instructions per clock will run much worse on an AMD processor but applications that take advantage of several cores run fine. The only program I have had a problem with the FX on is the dolphin emulator for gamecube games. While most games run fine, one very difficult game to emulate called Star Wars Rogue Squadron runs about like trying to run Doom 3 on a Pentium II.

So I am stuck playing Star Wars Rogue Squadron in 480p on my soft modded Wii, I have been tempted to try inserting higher resolution textures into my ripped iso of the game and see if the Wii can actually handle it. However, I imagine that will give out tons of errors and crash. I highly recommend the Asus Crosshair V Formula-Z Motherboard and a AMD processor for iommu and AMD-Vx virtualization. PCI Passthrough works great on this rig but I don't really have another system to compare it to. Skyrim, Call of Duty, Dragon Age, Grand Theft Auto V and so on work great inside of a virtual windows. Even if your not a gamer, this technology could be invaluable for CAD and graphics related work.

in order:

GNOME
Mate

or just xmonad

PCI passthrough is essentially direct access to peripherals (ie anything on the PCI bus) on a time or interrupt shared basis. Virtualized graphics in comparision presents a separate, full virtualization of the video chipset interface to each vm and then integrates the outputs (or parts of outputs) needed to display to the screen or screens. From what I've now read Intel did implement it but only on a single line of CPU's with integrated graphics.

It's hard to say really. XFCE is the one I've probably used the most, and it is a good window manager, but I actually really liked the setup Crunchbang [RIP] had. It's been a while, but I know it used OpenBox and Tint2 for the main GUI elements, along with Conky to display stats on the desktop. It was a nice, minimalistic setup that used very little system resources, but I do wish it were easier to configure and customize.

Honestly, I'd actually like to see a Linux environment that looks almost exactly like Aero on Windows 7, but of course more stable and configurable, and less resource intensive. A lot of people recommend KDE, but I dunno, it's just never felt right the last few times I used it. I really really liked the version of KDE I used on a Knoppix LiveCD over 10 years ago, but that version is probably long deprecated. I just remember going from Windows 98 to that really blew me away, and the XP machines I used at other people's houses didn't quite compare either.