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eltoslightfoot said:
I hear ya, brother. What’s nice about Unraid is it makes everything super easy. I have been a Unix/Linux admin. This is not that. You throw some drives in a PC, it takes care of the RAID stuff. Heck, the whole OS fits on a jump drive.

The biggie is making it secure. I do this, but also don’t expose it to the outside world. LAN only. That’s the major limitation.

Getting your house to sell is a WAY higher priority, and I hope it all goes really well for you! That is really stressful!
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Yes buddy it is. Plus where our house is very large for our area (4800 plus sq ft), so it limits our selling potential, we are going to live in a travel trailer until a good house comes up ha ha. Quite a size difference. I am hoping one of my childhood friends parents sell their house as soon as we sell so we can buy their house off them. It's the perfect size for us.
 
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I wonder what people's thoughts are on the various Desktop Environments.

I've been using Gnome, but I recently installed CachyOS inside Gnome-Boxes, to compare and contrast the two and had selected kde as the DE, surprisingly I didn't hate it. One of the things, I'm noticing with Gnome is that the more apps that are installed the more "panels you have to cycle through the app picker. I know I can make folders, and adjust the grid lines, but its design is wearing on me.

As I continue to compare and contrast cachyos/EOS I think I'll see if (or how) KDE grows on me. I do like have the hot corners, where I easily get to see all windows open in the Activities Overview, though from my googling it appears KDE offers this feature as well
 
maflynn said:
I wonder what people's thoughts are on the various Desktop Environments.

I've been using Gnome, but I recently installed CachyOS inside Gnome-Boxes, to compare and contrast the two and had selected kde as the DE, surprisingly I didn't hate it. One of the things, I'm noticing with Gnome is that the more apps that are installed the more "panels you have to cycle through the app picker. I know I can make folders, and adjust the grid lines, but its design is wearing on me.

As I continue to compare and contrast cachyos/EOS I think I'll see if (or how) KDE grows on me. I do like have the hot corners, where I easily get to see all windows open in the Activities Overview, though from my googling it appears KDE offers this feature as well
Click to expand...
Have you tried your hand at window managers yet? There is i3, DWM, Xmonad, bspwm, AwesomeWM, Qtile and more.

Granted they are more work to get up and running but if you take the time to set them up and get familiar with doing 99% of your interaction via the keyboard, they're really good.

My favorite is i3. One of my favorite things about a WM is they can (depending on how you configure it) remove all the borders from apps. That makes a super clean look and gives you more screen real estate for the apps you're running.

Below is an old screenshot when I had AwesomWM running. Top left is CMUS music player, bottom is vis, a visualizer and the right is cmatrix.
ArcoLinux_2020-10-11_14-33-32.png
 
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maflynn said:
Still, I went with kde, and while its very similar to windows
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Responding to an old post, but I just noticed this topic...

It is unfortunate how much the stock KDE configuration is set to resemble the Windows 7 layout, because it can very easily be customized into anything else. If you like to have control over practically every aesthetic choice, KDE is the only desktop that makes sense.
 
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pshufd said:
I'm stuck on Gnome just because I have used it for so long.
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That's why I picked gnome, its what I've always used. I have tried others, including Cosmic, (which was originally built on gnome), but found that DE to be a bit under-baked. It needs more time in the oven, though since I last tried it, the devs have released more updates.

I think I opted away from kde, because I'm so used to gnome

S.B.G said:
Have you tried your hand at window managers yet? There is i3, DWM, Xmonad, bspwm, AwesomeWM, Qtile and more.
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I've seen them being recommended, but so far I've not gotten the itch to delve into them.

CasualFanboy said:
because it can very easily be customized into anything else
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Yeah, that's what I kept reading, though I've not really dug too much into what kde offers, as I just knee jerked install gnome.
 
maflynn said:
I wonder what people's thoughts are on the various Desktop Environments.
Click to expand...
I'm a bit late to this thread...could have waxed lyrical about a whole host of different things that came up but I'll refrain from writing an essay!

For a very long time I used XFCE or Window Maker on all my home distros and used GNOME when I was using RHEL based stuff at work.

I have recently installed Solus (I think that uses Budgie?) and had that as my gaming PC for a few months, then switched it over to Debian with the default GNOME and will shortly be switching to Ubuntu, again with GNOME.

I have also recently re-installed Debian onto my laptop and went with GNOME as the default this time instead of XFCE or Window Maker.

My thoughts: I generally still prefer XFCE and Window Maker but I also appreciate the lack of any effort that GNOME involves—it works well, gets out the way mostly and has a sensible set of default applications. After years of saying I would stick with Window Maker (used it throughout Linux and BSD since the 1990s) I might finally be moving away and onto GNOME.

I have noticed that different distros bundle it slightly differently (for example Debian includes yelp as a hard dependency and removing yelp removes GNOME but RHEL based distros don't seem to do this). While I like the way Debian does things and its been my default for a long time, I think the best implementation of GNOME I have seen recently is in AlmaLinux.

Now the other popular one, KDE, I have limited experience of. Used it in early (pre-RHEL) Red Hat and also Corel Linux and again recently I set up a PC for a family member that had a bunch of virtual machines on and he wanted to launch them from icons on the desktop so I chose KDE for that...partly to see what the current state of play is...I found it to be pretty good but a bit to "windowsy" and not enough "unixy" for my liking...if that makes sense?

Sorry that was a bit of an essay in the end...my vote: GNOME, XFCE or Window Maker! (but probably GNOME)
 
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I love zorin. A bit of everything UI wise and just nice and light on system resources. My little M3 processor with 4gb of ram and a 960gb SSD skips right along on. I can even do photo editing on it. I would never try to edit a video on it however. It even gets decent battery life as well.
 
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Why is it that whatever platform I am using I want to keep using that platform? This feeling drives me up the wall. I am on my linux box now since my Windows laptop decided to not boot up, (need a new motherboard), and I just want to keep using this and get it all setup. Then when I use my WIndows systems for a bit, I just want to stay on them. I pull out my iPad and use it for a bit, I want to move to MacOS.

I need help. 😳
 
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Steve Adams said:
Why is it that whatever platform I am using I want to keep using that platform? This feeling drives me up the wall. I am on my linux box now since my Windows laptop decided to not boot up, (need a new motherboard), and I just want to keep using this and get it all setup. Then when I use my WIndows systems for a bit, I just want to stay on them. I pull out my iPad and use it for a bit, I want to move to MacOS.

I need help. 😳
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Eh, I have the opposite problem. The more I use an OS, the more I want a different OS. Maybe we need to meet in the middle LOL.
 
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eltoslightfoot said:
Eh, I have the opposite problem. The more I use an OS, the more I want a different OS. Maybe we need to meet in the middle LOL.
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Totally. Ha ha. I really do like Zorin and how snappy my systems feel using it. The software is the issue. If I could find a vector image editor that could edit Affinity files I think I would switch, I now contacted the company I use to get the templates from and see if they have something I could get from them.
 
I can get the files via adobe illustrator so I think Inkscape edits those without issue. I am not completely positive, some clarification would be helpful in this one. If so, I can make everything work for us!
 
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Got my windows system back up and running...........HOME. It's so much easier to work in windows. I get on the linux box and the scrolling is "snappier" and I think. Darn, this is great. Then I get on my windows system and everything is right.
 
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Thanks to gnome boxes, I can try out different distros and/or DEs.

I've been spending my time on KDE plasma, and while it wasn't exhaustive, its simply not resonating. While it does resemble the windows desktop experience, its just not something that I find efficient. Maybe I'm used too or prefer the Mac UI, with the dock and menubar, but gnome is definitely something that I still prefer over KDE. I get that you can customize KDE to a great extent, but overall, if I have to spend a lot of time to resemble the things of gnome, why not just use gnome.

Then there's cosmic, I have that in a VM as well, and decided to install the DE into my actual system. I did like that and I could see this replacing gnome for me, but it's simply not ready for primetime. Firing up a game on steam caused a major headache. My resolution is 4k, and the games I have are set to that in steam, but with cosmic the game started up in a tiny window in the center of the screen, with the internal resolution being 4k, so I only saw the upper corner section of the game (the window occupied about 1/6 of the desktop. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get it to play full screen. The only solution that sort of worked was bumping down the resolution - not idea but workable. I figured, lets stick with gnome given the bugs - at least for now.
 
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I got my vector packages from the company I purchase them from in Adobe illustrator format to try on Zorin with inkscape. He suggested that I won't be able to modify the files however. Time to give it a whirl in a few mins. It will be painfully slow as it's the ole m3 intel processor from 2018 ha ha.
 
I installed sddm on my cachyos install (in gnome boxes), installed xfce and window maker, I'm a bit surprised that windowmaker is able to run on a modern os, bt it seems to work.

Windowmaker:
I'm not in love with the UX, there's no menu, no dock, you have to right click the desktop to bring up a context menu to do things, like starting apps. Its cool, but not usable, at least for me. I think the design of this DE is based on such an old and largely abandoned methodology that its more inhibiting then helping. To put it another way, it gets in the way of me working on the computer, instead of disappearing inthe background allowing me to work as I want too. Of course its probably due to the learning curve and how I'm used to other DEs.
Screenshot From 2026-05-22 06-09-29.png


Xfce
There's a commonality/shared ancestry with windowmaker, including the same tools, i.e., thunar file manager. Surprisingly I'm not hating xcfe like windowmaker. it has a number of things within the design that I like, for instance the default icons on the desktop, the menu bar on top the quick launch bar on the bottom. The application menu is a bit odd, and is nearly exactly the same design of windowmaker - so that's a thing I'm not really enjoying

Maybe because windowmaker is x11 only, the wayland instance of xfce won't boot up in sddm - just a black screen. I may wipe this VM, or fire up another and see how xfce works w/o sddm, i.e., do I get the wayland verison.
Screenshot From 2026-05-22 06-12-26.png
 
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maflynn said:
Windowmaker:
I'm not in love with the UX, there's no menu, no dock, you have to right click the desktop to bring up a context menu to do things, like starting apps. Its cool, but not usable, at least for me. I think the design of this DE is based on such an old and largely abandoned methodology that its more inhibiting then helping. To put it another way, it gets in the way of me working on the computer, instead of disappearing inthe background allowing me to work as I want too. Of course its probably due to the learning curve and how I'm used to other DEs.
Click to expand...

This assessment is understandable. If it doesn't overload you with nostalgia for those good ol' days of the 90's, it probably loses some of the appeal. And the paradigm does take some getting used to if you're accustomed to the current use-case of MacOS or Windows.

It's surprisingly capable and customizable, but it does take some time and work. Overall I agree, it's a niche these days.
 
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maflynn said:
I installed sddm on my cachyos install (in gnome boxes), installed xfce and window maker, I'm a bit surprised that windowmaker is able to run on a modern os, bt it seems to work.

Windowmaker:
I'm not in love with the UX, there's no menu, no dock, you have to right click the desktop to bring up a context menu to do things, like starting apps. Its cool, but not usable, at least for me. I think the design of this DE is based on such an old and largely abandoned methodology that its more inhibiting then helping. To put it another way, it gets in the way of me working on the computer, instead of disappearing inthe background allowing me to work as I want too. Of course its probably due to the learning curve and how I'm used to other DEs.
View attachment 2631881

Xfce
There's a commonality/shared ancestry with windowmaker, including the same tools, i.e., thunar file manager. Surprisingly I'm not hating xcfe like windowmaker. it has a number of things within the design that I like, for instance the default icons on the desktop, the menu bar on top the quick launch bar on the bottom. The application menu is a bit odd, and is nearly exactly the same design of windowmaker - so that's a thing I'm not really enjoying

Maybe because windowmaker is x11 only, the wayland instance of xcfe won't boot up in sddm - just a black screen. I may wipe this VM, or fire up another and see how xcfe works w/o sddm, i.e., do I get the wayland verison.
View attachment 2631882
Click to expand...
I've always liked the simplicity of XFCE. However, because it's X11 don't use it with any resolution above 1080p, otherwise it gets too tiny to read. If you're using it in a VM then that shouldn't be too much of an issue.
 
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