Poll: Desktop environments

[chris2kari]

Clem I regard MATE & KDE the best DE's because they have PERSISTENT SETTINGS!
Speaking as a laptop user there is nothing more tedious than having to reset my sound back to an audible volume & reset my screen brightness back to a non blinding level every single time I have to login.

MATE beats KDE in resource usage & the Mint MATE edition is beautifully crafted so for me it's no contest - MATE.

Chris

[Kiuri]

Once I tried LM13 KDE I never went back, I like to have control of my Desktop environment and tweak the little details of how my OS looks and feels and KDE is the way to go, it's just amazing how customizable it is, heaven really. Beautiful Desktop effects, multi monitor support works tremendously well, each with their wallpaper slideshow settings and with multi desktops, I find myself drooling just staring at the screens! Amazing job!
You have to invest a bit of time in it to make it do what you want, extremely rewarding if you do so.
Out of the box it is quite good as well, as it is customization heaven you can make it as simple or as complex as you want it to be, still it has loads of options that might alienate new users with so many different settings. I am the kind of person that prefers to have the option than not having one.

[Hammer459]

My preferred Desktop is Enlightenment but MATE seems to work well. Gnome Shell is completely unusable and was my main reason for abandoning Red Hat that I have been using since 1995/96.

[I do Mint]

Just came from Mint 9 (Isadora) to Mint 13 Mate, just love it and use it for 80% of my tasks now.

[MaverickJester]

I am using KDE but now I am going to switch and try Cinnamon (14 RC). I have chosen to do this because of the progress being made or at least stated. Linux Mint is my favorite and I hope Cinnamon works well.

[pschlacter01]

my favorite is cinnamon!!

[carnaga]

I'm using unity and on my laptop I have mate. Both are wonderful desktops! Specially when you have customized them to suite your everyday needs

[Orbmiser]

Well was away from linux for about 2 years? As needed windows for Photo & Video Editing capabilities which linux sorely lacked back then. And Hated Gimp. So stopped after Hardy Heron. But still supplied wallpapers from my photography for default wallpapers in a couple of the Ubuntu distro's.

But thought to give Ubuntu 12.10 a whirl and was flabergasted at the Mess they call Unity and all the extra commericalization links and such. More resources used more sluggish and couldn't comprehend how they called it more Human Centeric? Maybe if I was using a tablet. But a mess for desktop and the way I like to do things.

Well downed the Mate & Cinnamon 13 version and decided I like Cinnnamon Buns & Distro's the most. Installed then week later darn 14 nadia comes out. So downed the iso and did custom format of / as had seprate /home and install went smoothly.

So far Great like the more Zen like Elegence of Mint Cinnamon and hope it keeps getting better. Tho have to do some serious looking and checking on Advanced Photo editing software available to be able to make a committed switch. As it stands now am triple boot Winxp,Win7 & Cinnamon 14.
.

[bwat47]

Cinnamon 1.6 is a massive improvement. Its now my preferred environment. Its got the best advantages of gnome 3 and the classic paradigm of gnome 2. Its rock stable and fast too, and has nice effects.

I'm amazed at how far cinnamon has come in such a short amount of times, I can't wait to see how much better it continues to get in the future too!

[mingle]

Hi all,

I've been a long time Windows user, and prior to that an Amiga (!) developer, but recently started using Linux Mint when I tried LM13 XFCE and found that it performed pretty much flawlessly - unlike my previous attempts with various versions of Ubuntu, which always resulted in a broken mess...

Anyway, there's one thing that constantly bemuses and kind-of frustrates me (and I know I'm probably preaching to the converted for a lot of people) is the need for 4 (or is it 5?!) versions of Linux Mint, each with their DE.

And yes, I do 'get' the usual response of "Oh, but this is what makes Linux so great - the choice!". However I can't help but think that some of the hours of duplicated effort that must surely go into producing the various versions of Mint (Mate, Cinnamon, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, blah, blah, blah) and the many other Linux distros could be far better spent developing apps, rather than propping up a hundred-and-one-different DEs.

Wouldn't it be better to bite the bullet and produce a single version of Mint in the future?

Mike.

[Dadzmad]

Xfce on both Lmde desktop and laptop. Does what I want to do, but it's clunky.
Openbox on Debian with Crunch-bang on older P-4 garage machine, makes the old one useable
Used to use Fedora - had enough of the end of life just about the time you got it to where you want it
I've still got Fedora 12 with Gnome & compiz on an old thinkpad thats just used for reading/browsing = can't part with the workspace cube on this one. The fault with my "newer machines" is lack of support for older ATI cards and so compiz is out
Dropped Sabyon after a trial - seems ok - but time to rethink Rigo - something like synaptic make much more sense.

[NissanNut]

Loving Mate on my laptop and server. Just ordered another old laptop for Mint 13 - mate for my son.

[elemenophee]

For people who doesn't like gnome shell, what are your reasons?

I haven't had any problem with it, only that sometimes when it starts he freezes and I have to switch to TTY and restart the process.

[xenopeek]

elemenophee, please move discussion to the chat section of the forum. This is a poll about your preference, not a discussion about others' preferences.

[badbodh]

tried all the biggies :fedora , suse ,ubuntu , mint 13. no other distro or mint editions run on gnome3 shell as good as mint 12 out-of-the-box in terms of customization , hard work involved and end-result including visual candies , i really wish 12 was their LTS instead

[xclusive585]

I cannot believe Cinnamon gets more votes than Mate. hmmm. I guess us old folks are outnumbered by the younger gnome3 crowd.

I for one like to customize everything and be able to create custom launchers quickly. Gnome3 and to a lesser degree Cinnamon are not helpful with this.

[StratosJL]

I used Cinnamon since it came out and liked it, too; even though it was not the most responsive or configurable environment ever.

Last week, by accident, when downloading mint 14, I picked the MINT iso. I played around with it. set it up with Compiz and what do you know? I like it better than Cinnamon, even though MATE+Compiz is not quite a match made in heaven.

Bottom line:

Cinnamon:
Needs to become more responsive.
Give configuration options to the people!
I like MATE's menu functionality better.
Give us wobbly windows and a rotating cube, please! For pleasure and functionality, alike.

MATE
Works very well, needs some work with themes and styling to become as elegant as Cinnamon.
And please make it work better with Compiz.

KDE
I was frustrated when Cinnamon would not work so well on my netbook and tried KDE's version for small screens. What a relief! Very clever idea!

PS
Don't make us use a mobile phone's interface on a desktop or laptop! Don't make us use a desktop's interface on a netbook or tablet!

[baptiste]

tried all the biggies :fedora , suse ,ubuntu , mint 13. no other distro or mint editions run on gnome3 shell as good as mint 12 out-of-the-box in terms of customization , hard work involved and end-result including visual candies , i really wish 12 was their LTS instead

Installing gnome-shell over a recent Cinnamon edition should be doable. The problem is with extensions breaking at point releases (i.e. gnome 3.2 to 3.4, or 3.6)
You should be well able to run Gnome 3 with a panel and a shutdown option in the power menu etc., but that would be a bet on say Gnome 3.6 and praying it doesn't break to hell in 3.8

This is probably one good reason for a full fork to Cinnamon, the Mint team would have to redo their customization work all over again everytime (I believe there's that issue with gtk3 theme already).

I cannot believe Cinnamon gets more votes than Mate. hmmm. I guess us old folks are outnumbered by the younger gnome3 crowd.

I for one like to customize everything and be able to create custom launchers quickly. Gnome3 and to a lesser degree Cinnamon are not helpful with this.

I like this, too.
Creating launchers is a bit difficult? Dunno, I've never used Cinnamon more than a few minutes at a time. Creating launchers is the weak point of LXDE too, in that desktop the plan is to handle it with the file manager (pcmanfm).

On my mint 13 mate desktop, I've installed it but it just drops me into gnome fallback with no error pop up. Even though I have a nvidia card and very smooth opengl (before and after upgrading from a 8400GS with 295.40 to a 7600GT with 304.64 driver)
On other computers I've seen it very smooth (laptop with radeon 5430m, supposedly the open source driver!), or a bit slow (low end geforce variant with open source driver) in which case the interest in funny animations goes away IMO.

Also on the Mint 12 laptop I used the other week (socket 754 sempron), flash videos seemed very slow, maybe a compositing desktop puts yet another layer of complexity between the video data and your eyes. The laptop was also cooking my penis but I don't know if the GPU was contributing a lot to the heat. So, for all these reasons, mainly the extreme variability (from non working to slow to fast) a 2D desktop is needed and Cinnamon and Mate as both main editions, released simultaneously is pretty perfect.
I gave Mint 13 Mate to a friend for him to install on his girlfriend's laptop, that was perfect, I thought we needed something that is guaranteed to not fail. Then he set up Mint 13 Cinnamon for himself.

[jamesbannon]

Just joined.

I'm using Mint 14 with Cinnamon. I used to use GNOME2, but abandoned that after the GNOME Shell came out (an abomination - horrible, horrible interface). Before Cinnamon, I tried XFCE4 & KDE, but I've never got on with either of these as I can't set up the fonts the way I like. My only gripe with Cinnamon is that customising the launcher panel is a bit of a pain. (I don't have short cuts on my desktop. I don't like the clutter.) I'd much rather it allowed adjusting the icons spacing and separators.

[nhatht]

I'm using Mate because Cinnamon, even if elegant DE, gives me problems on wireless connection and the apps for desktop and their tools are less and not complete. I'm disappointed by gnome 3 and all the worsening in comparison with gnome 2.xx.
Same that what happen for kde. To look for appearance , big loss of usability. Lxde is still too rigid and not friendly in customisability. I'll try Xfce, but now the best solution seem to use Ubuntu and unity ( Ubuntu team moved to unity once they understood how big trouble gnome 3 will be?)
Clem, try to give us back same Mint as version 10, Julia that I'm still using on my destop.
Thanks a lot for your big work.