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Which desktop environment is the best for Buster?

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Re: Which desktop environment is the best for Buster?

#21 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

Some people prefer simple window manager environments even on powerful computers with plenty of resources because they maintain simple, text-file oriented configuration and the smaller codebase offers a reduced attack surface for the security conscious.
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Re: Which desktop environment is the best for Buster?

#22 Post by Danielsan »

If you are new, I warmly suggest XFCE4: light, easy to use, highly customizable. By default is pretty ugly but it takes second to make it looking cool and modern!

https://itsfoss.com/customize-xfce/

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Re: Which desktop environment is the best for Buster?

#23 Post by oswaldkelso »

Which desktop environment is the best for Buster?
fixed: Which desktop environment is the best end off.

Buster should have little relevance and if it does it needs a very very good reason. I've believe the basic functions of a desktop have not changed much in the last 20 years. open, close move, copy, view , hide, read, write, link etc.

It's the interface that has changed. Loads of them with many variables as to why an "individual" would want a different interface.

For me it's lightness, as I run many old computers. Speed, ease of use and resource use is really important, I want instant response and any discernable lag is painful to me. The only place I allow lag is first start on big applications like a big browser, office suit or graphics application (inkscape for example). Easy of use and mouse and keyboard support. I love my mouse and want it to work anywhere, where it's strength can show. Bling is not one of my priority's except when demonstrating just how great my desktop is :-)

On my current setups I have TDE, and XFCE as the only desktops I have installed. I think they are the best ootb DE environments. Very suitable for new users and people that just want a sane easy to use interface. My Ex could hardly tell the difference between xfce and lxde but could use either. I'm not sure if she knew which she was running but if it had an easy to find menu it meant less grief for me.

For many years I ran black box, then switched to a very heavily tweaked openbox, and for the last 2 years I've run a slightly tweaked icewm. I say slightly tweaked but small tweaks can make a huge difference.

I honestly believe for the things I require my tweaked icewm is faster, easier to use and more functional than either full Gnome or KDE. ymmv
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Re: Which desktop environment is the best for Buster?

#24 Post by Soul Singin' »

oswaldkelso wrote:I honestly believe for the things I require my tweaked icewm is faster, easier to use and more functional than either full Gnome or KDE.
IceWM is certainly faster and easier to use. That's true. But saying that IceWM is "more functional" than Gnome or KDE is too generous. That would imply that Gnome and KDE are functional. They're not. . :mrgreen:

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Re: Which desktop environment is the best for Buster?

#25 Post by Hallvor »

IceWM - doing less with less efficiency since 1997. :mrgreen:
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Re: Which desktop environment is the best for Buster?

#26 Post by Soul Singin' »

Hallvor wrote:IceWM - doing less with less efficiency since 1997. :mrgreen:
I do not know how you define "efficiency," but the "doing less" part is exactly right.

I want something that "does less."

Flashy window animations. I want less of that. Please do not bend, twist or slide the windows on my computer screen. When I close a window, please do not make it disappear behind a ball of flames.

Smart menu suggestions. I want less of that. Please do not suggest applications based on my usage patterns. I know what I want in my menu. Please let me make that decision.

Desktop widgets. I want less of that. Please do not clutter my desktop with a bunch of folders, widgets and icons. I selected a beautiful desktop wallpaper. Seeing it covered with widgets is like looking at a backyard full of dog poop.

Notifications. I want less of that. Please do not display system messages in the tray. Unless my battery is running low, I do not need to see them.

IceWM is great because it "does less!" . :D

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Re: Which desktop environment is the best for Buster?

#27 Post by Bulkley »

Soul Singin' wrote:I want something that "does less."
Me too. Your reasons are similar to why I use Openbox.

Something that has puzzled me for years is the horizontal task bar, usually at the bottom. Computer screens lack vertical space. Paper documents usually have the long edge vertical. For some reason desktop screens are horizontal. I always want more vertical space so I set the task bar (tint2) on the left side and make it transparent.

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Re: Which desktop environment is the best for Buster?

#28 Post by oswaldkelso »

Bulkley wrote:
Something that has puzzled me for years is the horizontal task bar, usually at the bottom. Computer screens lack vertical space. Paper documents usually have the long edge vertical. For some reason desktop screens are horizontal. I always want more vertical space so I set the task bar (tint2) on the left side and make it transparent.
This all depends on how we want to use your desktop. I have two panels. icewm taskbar at the top because I want to see time, date, cpu, network, calc, calendar along with my tiling buttons and the like. I dislike the workspace/pager in icewm so run tint2 at the bottom of the screen. Likewise so I can see what's running and on which workspace without the extra step of revealing it.

It all comes down to how one want's to do things and if your DE/WM will allow it. Both openbox and icewm allow lots if folks can be arsed to read the configs and tweak them to their liking. My config turns off lots off icewm options because they screw with other things I want to control. Some of the new default features in 1.6.2 annoy the crap out of me but will no doubt be the bees knees to someone else. At least I can turn them off or hide them and use my desktop as I want it to be used.

Edit:
I see The latest released version is 1.6.3 (2019-11-24). but for my configs I still have 1.3.7 running on some machines and both work fine for my setup.
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Re: Which desktop environment is the best for Buster?

#29 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

Bulkley wrote:For some reason desktop screens are horizontal
Vertical panels restrict the space available for the clock — look how small the one in MX is, they have to use a mahoosive conky to compensate.

And the asymmetry is a sin against nature :mrgreen:
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Re: Which desktop environment is the best for Buster?

#30 Post by oswaldkelso »

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:
Bulkley wrote:For some reason desktop screens are horizontal
Vertical panels restrict the space available for the clock — look how small the one in MX is, they have to use a mahoosive conky to compensate.

And the asymmetry is a sin against nature :mrgreen:

Vertical panels are in general for users that don't have text in their panels or are Chinese. Serious question, I wonder if Chinese users turn their monitors 90 degrees?
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Re: Which desktop environment is the best for Buster?

#31 Post by MALsPa »

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:
Bulkley wrote:For some reason desktop screens are horizontal
Vertical panels restrict the space available for the clock — look how small the one in MX is, they have to use a mahoosive conky to compensate.

And the asymmetry is a sin against nature :mrgreen:
Ha-ha! Oh, well, I'm another one who prefers a left-side vertical panel. The xfce4-panel in MX is too thin for my tastes; easy enough to fix that. And I use a vertical tint2 panel with Openbox.

Image

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Re: Which desktop environment is the best for Buster?

#32 Post by Hallvor »

Soul Singin' wrote: I want something that "does less."
In general, I agree with you. In terms of functionality, the smallest code base that covers all your needs would be the ideal choice. Less code means fewer things that can go wrong.
Flashy window animations. I want less of that. Please do not bend, twist or slide the windows on my computer screen. When I close a window, please do not make it disappear behind a ball of flames.
I think it would be better to separate between what is enabled by default, and what can be enabled. The animations enabled by default are very modest. No twisting, sliding or fireballs are enabled, so I fail to see how this is a problem at all. And even if they were, it would be dead easy to turn them off.
Smart menu suggestions. I want less of that. Please do not suggest applications based on my usage patterns. I know what I want in my menu. Please let me make that decision.
Turn them off, then.
Desktop widgets. I want less of that. Please do not clutter my desktop with a bunch of folders, widgets and icons. I selected a beautiful desktop wallpaper. Seeing it covered with widgets is like looking at a backyard full of dog poop.
Oh please. Do you think Bester69's desktop is what the average KDE desktop looks like? :lol:
Notifications. I want less of that. Please do not display system messages in the tray. Unless my battery is running low, I do not need to see them.
Disable them, then.
IceWM is great because it "does less!" . :D
If you are happy with it, great, but those "annoyances" you mentioned are either easy to shut off or are not even enabled. You may be fortunate and have IceWM to your liking out of the box, but I am guessing you have configured that to your liking as well...

What I didn't like about IceWM:
-Lack of localization
-Lack of features
-No compositor
-The dated UI
-Too much text file editing

What I liked about IceWM:
-Very easy to change appearance
-Flexible
-Small code base

What I don't like about KDE:
-Unintuitive. This is the first desktop environment I have had to use Youtube videos to perform simple tasks. (Well done, devs!)
-The number of options can be overwhelming


What I like about KDE:

-You can create any desktop look and feel you want. Everything, including the taskbar, is widgets.
-Good, mature compositor
-Great localization
-Very good native applications
-Memory footprint like XFCE, but vastly more feature rich
-Modern and consistent UI
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Re: Which desktop environment is the best for Buster?

#33 Post by Soul Singin' »

Hallvor wrote:
Soul Singin' wrote:I selected a beautiful desktop wallpaper. Seeing it covered with widgets is like looking at a backyard full of dog poop.
Oh please. Do you think Bester69's desktop is what the average KDE desktop looks like? :lol:
bester69 wrote:Image
If that's what the average KDE desktop looks like, then I fear for the future.

In fairness to you, I must say that your points are valid. And in fairness to KDE, I must say that KDE is the desktop that I started with way back in the days of KDE 3.5. I still have a soft spot for KDE, but these days I only have IceWM installed on my machine.

Here's a nice memory:

Image

The wallpaper is the "Candle in the Dark" photo from the Cassini mission to Saturn. The large crescent moon is Titan and the smaller moon is Enceladus ... without any desktop widgets obscuring the view. . 8)

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Re: Which desktop environment is the best for Buster?

#34 Post by Hallvor »

Soul Singin' wrote:And in fairness to KDE, I must say that KDE is the desktop that I started with way back in the days of KDE 3.5. I still have a soft spot for KDE, but these days I only have IceWM installed on my machine.
And in all fairness I must say that it took a very long time for me to accept and like KDE after they ditched KDE 3.5. :lol: I abandoned KDE for quite some time, but it matured and I grew into liking it.
Here's a nice memory:

Image
That is a very nice wallpaper.
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Re: Which desktop environment is the best for Buster?

#35 Post by oswaldkelso »

The key issue missing in this thread is what is your hardware?

If you have an i7 with 8Gb of ram then maybe Gnome or KDE is the best for you
If you have loads of 32bit machines with as low as a 1GB of ram forget the big DE's

In short you need to evaluate you hardware, time and ability to learn before you can even think about which desktop environment to try and use. Now don't get me wrong I may pimp light-weight but I love bloat as much as the next person. The number of "obsolete" computers I could get from windows users because they're to slow could fill my shed. I seriously doubt I'll ever need to buy a new computer ever again :mrgreen:
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Re: Which desktop environment is the best for Buster?

#36 Post by Wheelerof4te »

I am using the vanilla GNOME on Debian 10. Prefer it to others. Ironically, the Windows key is the most used key on my keyboard :D

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Re: Which desktop environment is the best for Buster?

#37 Post by sickpig »

@OP if you have got ancient hardware then maybe buster isn't for you. As even a netinstall will consume upwards of 175 mb RAM at non graphical login.

I tried tinycore linux the other day and it takes around 60mb to graphical login and has all the popular applications in their repos.

Or if you want to stick to Buster then maybe LXDE. Am surprised nobody mentioned it in this thread or if they did I might have missed it.

Edit - TDE is also quite low on resources.

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Re: Which desktop environment is the best for Buster?

#38 Post by Mr. Lumbergh »

As many have said, what do you like and/or need from a DE? Something light that stays out of the way? Something configurable? Something easy?
I like KDE and a lot of folks say it's resource-heavy, but I only find that it uses a few percent of CPU and memory. Here's a "top" of the first few things running right now on my system:

Code: Select all

  31341 lumbergh -51   0 4304664 164516  86020 S  32.6   0.2   9:43.00 lmms.real                              
  31434 lumbergh -51   0 1477912 395732  64536 S  18.6   0.6   5:26.91 RemoteVstPlugin                        
  28705 lumbergh  20   0 2139692 421488 119452 S  15.9   0.6  20:52.40 chromium                               
  31481 lumbergh -51   0 1145148 160604  24136 S  13.3   0.2   4:02.50 RemoteVstPlugin                        
  30778 lumbergh  20   0 2165248 498244 107532 S  11.3   0.8   4:50.09 chromium                               
   2625 lumbergh   9 -11 2010548  28236  22280 S   7.0   0.0   2:42.80 pulseaudio                             
   2074 root      20   0 4466440 150548 106408 S   6.3   0.2   4:38.97 Xorg                                   
  28413 lumbergh  20   0 2470140 203744 117760 S   6.3   0.3   7:52.77 chromium                               
  31394 lumbergh  20   0   24284  21228   1456 S   6.0   0.0   1:40.88 wineserver64                           
   2753 lumbergh  20   0 4432940 144280 102848 S   3.7   0.2   3:23.43 kwin_x11                               
   4247 lumbergh  20   0 2927676 256668 171732 S   2.3   0.4   0:16.89 Web Content 
Xorg is running a little higher than normal because I'm using a TV and monitor, streaming a news show to the TV in Chromium while talking to y'all here on Firefox. Kwin is at less than 4, even still. There are other KDE processes that eat up perhaps another percent, but the things clearly eating up the most right now are the LMMS DAW and the synth plugins for the project I'm working on, and the video I'm streaming through Chromium.
That actually brings up one of the things that keeps bringing me back to KDE: the standard KDE volume control in the tray gives you the option of directing the sound output on a per app basis; with just a couple clicks the video's sound is coming through the TV via the HDMI connection on the graphics card, Firefox would output to the onboard sound card if I was playing something there, and LMMS is using the Scarlett audio interface on USB. None of the "light" DE's would do this for me as simply, nor would Cinnamon for that matter. I'm sure most people aren't running three discrete sound devices at once, however, so why would it be a selling point to them?
Get whatever works best for you; your needs and taste in interface aren't the same as everyone else's. The great thing is, it doesn't cost you anything or break compatibility to try out different DE's.

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