What Desktop environment do you use?

[alienspy]

Hello! Let's have a poll about DE popularity.

I guess the votes will be like this for top 5. We will see if i am right

1. KDE

2. Gnome

3. XFCE

4. MATE

5. Cinnamon

I, personally, use Gnome on a desktop and XFCE on an old laptop.

[Fossy]

Nothing but Cinnamon here ( 4 Debian Bookworm users )

[alienspy]

Nothing but Cinnamon here ( 4 Debian Bookworm users )

Do you know about any prominent differences between Cinnamon versions of Debian and of Linux Mint?

[Fossy]

Nothing but Cinnamon here ( 4 Debian Bookworm users )

Do you know about any prominent differences between Cinnamon versions of Debian and of Linux Mint?

Our trajectory : Linux Mint > LMDE > now eksklusively Debian with Cinnamon as DE environment .
Never stopped/questioned the OOTB Cinnamon version of Debian .
Nor would I know why ... never had any problems with it .

[alienspy]

Our trajectory : Linux Mint > LMDE > now eksklusively Debian with Cinnamon as DE environment .
Never stopped/questioned the OOTB Cinnamon version of Debian .
Nor would I know why ... never had any problems with it .

May i ask what was the reason that have driven you from Mint to Debian?

[alienspy]

Damn, i am sorry. I added CLI only line, and the poll was reseted : ((

A few votes were lost.

[nooblinx]

I also use cinnamon. gnome was good old days when had menu. it's now confusing me when I want to find an app I should scroll a long list or remember it's name and type it in search bar

[alienspy]

it's now confusing me when I want to find an app I should scroll a long list or remember it's name and type it in search bar

I just moved all important apps in "folders" on the first screen list and it seems better for me than the "classical" menu in Gnome Applications extension for example.

[nooblinx]

it's now confusing me when I want to find an app I should scroll a long list or remember it's name and type it in search bar

I just moved all important apps in "folders" on the first screen list and it seems better for me than the "classical" menu in Gnome Applications extension for example.

but I like categories

[Diesel330]

Cinnamon is used exclusively here. When I moved to Linux I compared it with Windows 10 and I found it better in all aspects, simpler, snappier, with easy to remember paths of action

I also have tried XFCE which I found too raw for the lightness it offers. And I found KDE too heavy for my computers but overall as good as Cinnamon

[Fossy]

Our trajectory : Linux Mint > LMDE > now eksklusively Debian with Cinnamon as DE environment .
Never stopped/questioned the OOTB Cinnamon version of Debian .
Nor would I know why ... never had any problems with it .

May i ask what was the reason that have driven you from Mint to Debian?

My apologies: no comment.

would rather leave it at " why Debian " ? , because of :
https://www.debian.org/
https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian
https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/cu ... so-hybrid/
last but least :
index.php ...

[steve_v]

KDE/Plasma (since 1.0), or the CLI. Depends on the machine and it's role.
Even on a fast desktop, for any serious administrative, file management, or development work I'll usually use the CLI (though probably in a konsole window these days). Rodent-fondling is fine for mucking about on the interwebs, but it's just too slow and too distracting if I'm trying to get something done.

[fabien]

I voted XFCE and LXDE, I mostly use XFCE. On startup, XFCE uses about 900 MB and LXDE about 300 MB (on Bullseye).
Last summer, just to try it out, I installed LXQt on an old and very slow laptop. I was surprised to find out that it was powered (by default) by xfwm4, I expected something more KDE oriented. So it makes no great difference with XFCE in terms of memory use. It's a strange (and interesting) mix of GTK and Qt. The look is better than that of LXDE, and I appreciated their terminal (qterminal). But for this kind of machine, I should have installed LXDE.
Long ago, my first WM was Window Maker. I also used KDE for a while, it was KDE 3.5, but then came 4.0. Since then, I've been using XFCE, trusting in the stability of their design.

[None1975]

On startup, XFCE uses about 900 MB

And why does XFCE4 use so much RAM? I ask because when I used Debian Bullseye with the XFCE desktop environment, XFCE4 used about 300mb...

[fabien]

On startup, XFCE uses about 900 MB

And why does XFCE4 use so much RAM? I ask because when I used Debian Bullseye with the XFCE desktop environment, XFCE4 used about 300mb...

I can't tell why, that's just what I see (BTW, I double checked and it's rather 800 MB). My architecture is amd64, i386 probably uses less memory. Also, Lightdm takes up memory and I have xfce4-goodies and Thunar plugins installed. However, I find 300 MB a bit surprising.

I guess the votes will be like this for top 5. We will see if i am right

1. KDE

2. Gnome

3. XFCE

4. MATE

5. Cinnamon

Here is what gives the Debian Popularity Contest:
(# means rank. I retain the best rank for a given source package)
gnome-core #1855 (gnome-shell #1614)
xfce4 #2709 (xfwm4 #2476)
kde-plasma-desktop #3219 (kwin-common #3027)
mate-desktop-environment-core #4415
cinnamon-common #4537
lxde-core #5133
lxqt-core #6899

libx11-6 is #110 and libwayland-server0 is #525. Does that mean that most popcon participants using a WM don't use a DE?

[None1975]

I can't tell why, that's just what I see (BTW, I double checked and it's rather 800 MB). My architecture is amd64, i386 probably uses less memory. Also, Lightdm takes up memory and I have xfce4-goodies and Thunar plugins installed. However, I find 300 MB a bit surprising.

My system is also amd64. And I also used lightdm. But 900 mb is abnormal for a desktop environment like xfce4 and even more running on an older version of Debian.
I don't know why your system with XFCE4 uses so much RAM. To me it looks like memory leak or things like that. On Debian 12 (cold startup), KDE using 730 mb.

[fabien]

900 mb is abnormal for a desktop environment like xfce4

I should have specified that I take this value from the XFCE4 System Load Monitor applet. A more universally recognized command yields this:

Code: Select all

$> free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           7.5Gi       498Mi       6.4Gi       134Mi       527Mi       6.6Gi
Swap:           15Gi          0B        15Gi

[Fossy]

I see little not to say no discrepancy between this Poll and the data provided by the Debian Popularity Contest ( @Fabien thank You )
However, it strikes me that both Cinnamon and Mate as DE are left far behind .
Strikes me as strange , considering that in the distribution world these are " popular " DE environments .... isn't it ?

How can this be explained ?

For the record, I am an ordinary computer c.q. laptop user … who after having renounced Microsoft … has experimentally determined that for the Linux distributions I am interested in , finally ended up at Debian GNU/Linux circa august 2021 , 4 Gib of RAM and an SSD or NVMe is not only a minimum requirement these days, but more than enough to deal comfortably and carefree with what the World Wide Web has to offer …
and Cinnamon has for a decade or so never been an obstacle on ditto laptops .

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

[canci]

sway wm

[d76]

i3 wm