What is your ideal desktop experience?

Which desktop paradigm would you prefer?

  • Dock (ala. macOS/NeXTSTEP)

    Votes: 6 12.0%

  • Taskbar (ala. Windows)

    Votes: 6 12.0%

  • Panel (ala. Classic Gnome)

    Votes: 5 10.0%

  • Minimalist (is. WM)

    Votes: 27 54.0%

  • Other..

    Votes: 6 12.0%
  • Total voters
    50
Cthulhux said:
Last time I tried KDE, it ate all my RAM, so KDE was the only application software I could use.
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KDE does not eat RAM, but makes use of it... It handles low resources well & runs sufficiently well on a system with 1 GB RAM (I tested that), since it's framework has undergone a major overhaul a decade ago or so, with emphasis on resource usage. Graphical effects are auto-tuned to match the hardware's capabilities, and it also adopts it's RAM usage. Various tests showed KDE's RAM footprint is slightly higher than XfCE's and lower than Gnome or Mate, while at the same time it offers much more features. Naturally, these must be coded & need data, so that's reasonable. Obviously, if you don't need many features, you can tweak a minimalistic DE to match your workflow. Once your needs grow, that can become a time-consuming task, and you may be better off using a "full" DE like Mate, XfCE or even KDE and accept there are features you don't use (and, of course, bugs).
Personally, I prefer to use text editors, web browsers and the like, but what do I know?
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I'll never understand the argumentation to choose the combination of a minimalistic DE (because it uses less resources) + over-bloated, resource-hungry web browser (firefox), whose source code is a sequence of security flaws & needs a dozen of resource hungry plugins to work properly.
pkg rsize firefox: 228MiB vs. pkg size falkon: 10.3MiB
 
mjollnir said:
I'll never understand the argumentation to choose the combination of a minimalistic DE (because it uses less resources) + over-bloated, resource-hungry web browser
Click to expand...

While I agree that modern web browsers are usually annoyingly bloated (which is why I’m always trying alternatives), I still prefer a minimalistic DE with a resource-hungry web browser to a resource-hungry DE with a resource-hungry web browser. The only desktop I need is a Run A Command dialog - or even: menu.
 
Beastie7 said:
For those who picked the minimalist option, what drives you to such an environment? Is it the keyboard-centric experience of managing windows or some other reason?

If a full DE incorporated a window manager with built in key bindings (like i3, etc), and gave you the ability to get rid of client side decorations (ie. title bars), and taskbars, would you use it? Kind of like a on/off switch between a ‘minimal’ experience and a full featured window manager.
Click to expand...

As some have already noted, it's really a matter of taste more than pragmatics or even logic. I can rationalize my affinity for minimalist WMs (I personally use spectrwm), but it's a rhetorical exercise. I really like tiling vs floating, so that's a thing for me. I like that stripped down look. I like configuring it myself with scripts. I like being able to make a distraction-free environment. I like keyboard-centric navigation. And I like being able to trim down running apps as I please.

And to your second point, I actually would say no. It's done often actually, where people use i3 et al. in tandem with Plasma. I've tried it, but it's defeating at least part of the purpose for me, which is running a fairly spartan system.
 
MarcoB said:
You forgot that falkon needs an additional rendering engine (qt5-webengine) which makes the total package size a lot larger.
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Yes, ( pkg size qt5-webengine: 144 MiB) plus many other Qt & KDE libraries. Firefox needs many other packages, as well (38, incl. various GTk2 & GTk3 libs vs. falkon needs 26). But there's an important point here: any other KDE application can make use of the HTML render engine, e.g. the "jack of all trades device" Konqueror & the KDE PIM suite Kontact, and they're all benefiting the tight integration & cross-module interoperability that the framework offers. E.g. I'm comfortably reading RSS news (among others, FreeBSD newsfeed) with Kontact.
EDIT and security advisories & errata notices. But I did not manage yet to include the FreeBSD Events iCal calendar :(
 
I'm using MATE but found I'm mostly use the Task Bar like when I'm still use Windows. I'm too used to the Windows' way, so even after converted to Linux then FreeBSD, I'm still somewhat a Windows user with a Unix terminal.
 
I installed several GUI-s on my desktop. SDDM first for logins, then KDE Plasma, Gnome3 (broken today), Xfce and MATE. All accessible from SDDM login screen so I can easily experiment and use all of these. GUI-s also bundle applications, especially KDE and these are cross-functional. After using Plasma for some time I switched to Gnome 3, but still use some KDE applications. Actually liked Gnome3 and it is pity that it does not work any more. Xfce I keep for backup, but feels a bit inconvenient. Eventually landed on MATE with some bundled applications from KDE and Gnome3.

However already used to MATE, I have still a little dream about Gnome3 coming back again...

... and of course web-browser and mail client are big parts of desktop experience, however not directly part of GUI. So I have installed (from ports) Chromium and Firefox for web and Thunderbird for mail. Thunderbird is my absolute favorite! Chromium and Firefox are pretty much equal for me. Chromium builds a long time from source...

In addition for that Shotwell for photos, Gimp for editing, FreePlane for mind-mapping, Wireshark for packet sniffing, VLC media player, LibreOffice for documents, etc. Used to like KDE terminal, but switched to MATE terminal after some time. Both still available.
 
Cthulhux said:
Until you tried Acme.
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Please elaborate.

Beastie7 said:
All of you are grey beards.
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Unfortunately I am far from being a greay beard. I hope to get there one day, but it will certainly be a long journey. I grew up with mice already invented & imancipated. However, I prefer something minimalistic / heavily key-stroke based / tiling. I started out using awesome but converted to i3 eventually and that's what I've been using ever since whenever possible.
 
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Honestly, probably not, unless you use a tiling WM that you control with a mouse (or you want to break with your habits). Acme does not support a mouse - it requires one. :)
(But I surely like using it.)
 
I have been using twm for a short while long time ago, followed by rather happily using fvwm2 for many years, after which came gnome2, about which i had rather mixed feelings. After the demise of gnome2 I tried out mate, but somehow it felt like someone did s/gnome/mate/g on the source code of gnome and changed the sticker on the box. It just didn't feel right. At least not at that time. Then my old desktop machine broke and had to be replaced. As the integrated HD graphics in my new machine wasn't supported at that time, my only 'desktop experience' for a while was FreeBSD /w text-console in dual-boot configuration with windows, until I added a supported nvidia graphics card, which finally brought new perspective to regaining a FreeBSD desktop. After throwing up over gnome3 and trying out a few other DEs, I finally landed with KDE5 plasma, which in a way just felt about right, so I made myself a new home and never looked back.

Not that I'm a typical desktop user, most of my desktop experience runs in one terminal emulator or the other. Otherwise I use a browser or two, an email program, a file manager and media player, but that's about it. For me it's the little things that decide whether my desktop experience is a pain or a pleasure. Like making effective use of virtual desktops, and by that I mean being able to switch those using keyboard shortcuts, or having a desktop that actually does work with focus-follows-mouse setting (one thing that Microsoft never really got to work, even in Windows 10, or maybe they are just ignorant of people who don't feel comfortable with their click-to-focus policy). If you want to experience true pain, try navigating the Steam UI on windows with your mouse set up for focus-follows-mouse. :mad:

Also it is 2020 not 1995, so when I think of desktop I most certainly do not think of things like editing my .fvwm2rc in a text editor. Been there, done that, thanks, no more please. This is where KDE5 really pleases me. It is highly configurable and extensible without ever needing to touch a single text configuration file (unlike gnome3 where even some of the most basic configuration settings are considered 'tweaks' and you need additional software to 'tweak' your settings). KDE5 also seems to support my bad habit of adopting my Windows 10 desktop to my FreeBSD desktop and vice-versa rather well, and I can't say that it eats my RAM either. In fact just couple months ago I wiped Windows 10 off my old Notebook (core2 duo, 4GB RAM) after I finally had it, and replaced it with FreeBSD 12.1 /w KDE5 plasma and ZFS on root and it runs perfectly fine for the things I need it for.
 
When I use a GUI, in both Linux and FreeBSD, what I like to have is consistency, ease of use and some security (namely a login manager that allows a non-root X session).

KDE would have been my choice but there are some things that annoy me: SDDM is not visually consistent with the rest of KDE desktop, does not allow non-root X session and in desktop font rendering is not as good as in a GTK based GUI.

Gnome 3 - I don't like it at all, its desktop experience feels alien to me and although it does have a login manager that allows non-root session (GDM3), this login manager is also very hard to customize and thus it's not visually consistent with the rest of desktop.

Cinnamon and Mate - I don't know much about them since I rarely used them so I cannot comment about their strengths and weaknesses.

Xfce is now my preferred DE - very customizable and easy to use, unfortunately it does not have a login manager that allows a non-root session - LightDM would be perfect if it would allow non-root X like GDM3 while retaining its customizability.
So I use Xfce without a DM, by typing startx which is a bit annoying but nothing is perfect.

I don't use WMs because they're not that easy to use and not visually consistent when running different apps but I admit that some of them, like WindowMaker, are interesting.

So my ideal desktop would be something like Xfce + a really customizable login manager like LightDM that also would allow a non-root X.
 
Dendros said:
When I use a GUI, in both Linux and FreeBSD, what I like to have is consistency, ease of use and some security (namely a login manager that allows a non-root X session). KDE would have been my choice but there are some things that annoy me: SDDM is not visually consistent with the rest of KDE desktop, does not allow non-root X session and in desktop font rendering is not as good as in a GTK based GUI. [...]
Click to expand...
What do you mean with non-root X session? Do you mean the Xserver runs as user? There's a Xorg.wrap suid root, excerpt from the man page: By default Xorg.wrap will autodetect if root rights are necessary, and if not it will drop its elevated rights before starting the real X server. By default Xorg.wrap will only allow executing the real X server from login sessions on a physical console.
On font rendering in KDE I can not comprehend that it's worse than other's. Maybe you did not have anti-aliasing enabled?
font_anti-aliasing.png
 
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sidenote : There are not many window managers based on qt/kde. The only one i know is kwin.
I have not tried it but maybe lxqt+kwin
 
mjollnir: yes, by "non-root X session" I mean running X as an user. Not many Display Managers allow for this, I know this because when I type ps aux, I see that X has root as UID. I like that OpenBSD has a Display Manager (xenodm) that starts X as the _x11 user, but I don't know if it's configurable and themeable.

GDM3 also allows this but as I said, it's not customizable, at least not easily. And it pulls a lot of Gnome dependencies if you want to use it in other DEs.
If LightDM would start X as a non-root user, it would be a perfect DM since it's easily customizable so it can be made consistent with the desktop.

About KDE, its font rendering is not as good as in a GTK based desktop because fonts are not crisp but blurry and yes, I do have anti-aliasing enabled but still does not look good enough to me. By "does not look good enough" I mean that no matter what tweaks I apply, fonts are still a bit blurry, not crisp and clear.
 
Well, I can not comprehend that... On some monitors, the hinting parameter makes a difference. Usually it should be none or light on modern HiRes displays. In contrast, the Gtk people decided to ignore HiRes setups, and intentionally set the DPI to always be 96 DPI. Such nonsense was the final reason for me to to deinstall all Gtk apps. Search the web & you will find the outrage. If I enable the physically correct DPI, Gtk apps look even smaller than on this screenshot
xisp_too_small.png

PS: I'm aware that KDE has bugs, too. But these are not intentionally.
 
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In every DE that I have used, including KDE, I always set hinting to slight and anti-aliasing is enabled, I even create a fonts.conf file in my home directory to manually set all these settings and yet I never managed to make fonts in KDE to look as crisp as I would like. That is just my experience, perhaps I'm doing something wrong.
 
On FreeBSD, Xorg + WindowMaker + GNUstep utilities
But that's if you got a dedicated FreeBSD machine with a hardware terminal.

I keep away from X remote sessions (it works properly only in the UNIX domain),
so I side with the command line interface philosophy (how cool Microsoft hijacked the CLI for Common Language Interface?).

FreeBSD, as versatile as it is, shines shiniest through ssh.

It also depends on your hardware though. Finding the best *NIX-like system depends on hardware support,
For my hardware, Fedora Linux is the best match. That is, if you need GUI interface.

For CLI/ssh, FreeBSD is the mother.
 
Rastko said:
On FreeBSD, Xorg + WindowMaker + GNUstep utilities
But that's if you got a dedicated FreeBSD machine with a hardware terminal.

I keep away from X remote sessions (it works properly only in the UNIX domain),
so I side with the command line interface philosophy (how cool Microsoft hijacked the CLI for Common Language Interface?).

FreeBSD, as versatile as it is, shines shiniest through ssh.

It also depends on your hardware though. Finding the best *NIX-like system depends on hardware support,
For my hardware, Fedora Linux is the best match. That is, if you need GUI interface.

For CLI/ssh, FreeBSD is the mother.
Click to expand...
+ emacs, that's a game changer
 
Thanks for the replies and votes. I’m actually surprised the Taskbar, and Dock options are relatively tied. This will put a slight shift in my design process.
 
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