What do you use? and what do you prefer?

I just switched from Gnome (2) to xfce (which i'd had on my laptop for a few years and really liked)


Never really played with KDE much, also have fluxbox on this box but don't use it;

Just tried Unity on my media center PC (hence the thread) and so far... it's slick but annoying from a "power-user" perspective (or command line junky, whatever you'd term that...)

I just got a masters of technology degree and I have no idea what you just said. I guess I should ask for my money back.

I have Gnome 3 on my work computer, and there are some things I really dislike... Thinking of changing to something else.

Terror: They are desktop environments for linux. :)

LOL. um, what exactly did they teach you Terror? you don't know anything about Linus Torvalds?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds

it's been around for a bit...

I've switched to os x. all of the desktop environments for linux suck (unless i spend 4 months fiddeling with everything but cba).
Either they look ugly or they look nice but are so bloated and take so much HW.(I love Linux i just don't like the different DE's or how they perform.)

It has cli, it's a unix system so a bit different from a standard linux cli and some things needs to be modified but i really like it. There are package managers for os x too so you stuff works nice. The gui is awesome and the benefit of being able to run some games is great.

Running it on my htpc too and using plex as media centre, it rox :-)

Check out tonymacx86.com if you wanna try it...

xubuntu/xfce
superlight
reliable
clean

I like my Arch/KDE 4.6.5 setup. I like KDE because of its aesthetic qualities. It's very customizable and has GUI front-ends to configure (pretty much) anything from your desktop. I personally like these types of bells and whistles, and the fancy compiz-like effects are nice as well (they're optional of course). I also prefer the look of Qt apps to GTK.

However, if you want really minimal, and customizable, and don't mind editing a fair bit of .conf files to get there, Openbox is light on resources. It requires more manual setup to get even a proper task bar (out of the box), but you have the freedom to install only what you need.

Another power-user option may be a tiling window manager like Awesome or Xmonad. These are not like windows-style window managers, they're kind of like a graphical implementation of the terminal multiplexer screen.

I've played with OSX and its CLI is maddening; it doesn't support things that *should* be standard like... delete whole words, home and end of line... it's maddening

also linux has so many free things that just work *better* than anything else when it comes to programming &etc -- like gedit! /me likes gedit a lot

also osx also is bloated and eats hardware =/ that's why you can't buy low-end macs heh




@GE Arch is waaay much work! haha... well maybe i'll use it some time...

so far ubuntu + xubuntu-desktop installed is quite nice i think; i still think i'll try KDE some time though...


but i need to upgrade from ubuntu 8.04 sometime here...



I played with unity again on a live CD now that i know that the top thing is a search button, and that they want you to search for things... it works... but i don't like the idea of searching for things, they should all just be under a menu imho heh

I prefer KDE to Gnome but really haven't done much with any of those.

The initial Arch setup can be a little daunting, but you gain a whole new respect for the operating system and the people packaging it and other *nix distros. Once it's installed, it's really not bad. You can finely tune your upgrades (for instance I didnt upgrade to KDE 4.7 cause its buggy as hell). If this is for the machine you run the game on, you're much better off staying with an LTS version of Ubuntu, or even Debian (though debian stable is incredibly far behind main upstreams).

y'all must not make much money doing the computer junk if you feel the need to use a GNU OS.

It's not about the money (for me). I just don't like microsoft or apple.

Since I started running linux (almost 4 years ago), I've never had to:

Scan my computer for malware
Scan my computer viruses
Clean my registry for errors
Defrag my hard drive
Do a complete reinstall due to sluggish behavior
Reboot because of a locked up application
Pay $100+ for it
Pay more $$$ for virus detection/removal software

I'm not a huge gamer, so the fact that many games may not work isn't a problem. It's been getting progressively better over the years and many games will run on WINE.

I find applications are better written for a Linux desktop since it's not corporate fluff doing the thinking. It's made by real users.

im using fedora 15 with gnome 3. i love the look of it, and cannt wait for gnome 3 to continue to add features it should have already. Alot of extensions fix those problems though, and fedora actually works better on my laptop than ubuntu (for example fedora actually restarts my laptop, where debian/ubuntu/mint could not for some reason)

i put gnome 2 on arch in virutal box, but yeah it is way too much work. Archbang linux is nice too if you want an arch system(the only pure prebuilt arch distro), but still is alot of work as well. i just recently tried to update it (its on an old laptop), and it is spitting errors at me for no reason :P

For low resources, the desktops are(less to high) Englightment > lxde (with openbox or fluxbox)> xfce > gnome 2 > unity & gnome 3

if you play games, just set up your computer for dual boot =P

I tried unity for a bit. But switched back to the previous ubuntu look (classic I believe). Since I tend to game occasionally I either use my desktop or need to get me a dual boot. Mind you, I don't know a lot about computers :P But Unity / ubuntu feels good :)

MrBNB: yea, it's not really about the money; I have windows 7 but can't program on it very well... there is a windows version of gedit, but it works better on linux; middle click paste is always really nice too...

but the main thing is the command line; i do tons and tons of stuff via command line; i was trying to organize my media in windows... was moving .avi's from subfolders to main folder...

and then realized i could just go
mv */*.avi .
rather than having to do them all manually... 1 second done, bam ;) saves like 5 mins of messing around


little things like that



The GUI experience has a bit to go still on linux, imho, but it's very good for programming + CLI


plus the fact that the free utilities for linux are awesome compared to what you can get on windows in 90% of cases

web browser, media player stuff -- and video & surround sound drivers, are better on windows still; but not much else (granted that's what a lot of people use the most but...)

And gaming support, though lately it's been *really* good with wine; SC2 on linux works np ! :)

Linux from Scratch! No GUI!! AHAHAHA
Solaris 10 and sometimes that piece of fluff Solaris 11!! NO GUI! AHAHA

When I want a linux desktop I have been going with Ubuntu which I am pretty sure uses Unity?!

It's not bad I really haven't tried all the others, then again I liked the simplicity of CDE for Solaris. I guess I have never used Linux/Unix as an actual desktop enough to comment.

For programming I use VisualStudio and then just compile it at command line. Then again nearly everything I make these days is cross platform, for Windows, or OS agnostic. I have used vi a few times to fix simple errors else I samba or ftp to it.

Oh about the command-line. My first experience with a command line was Solaris because it was our home file server. Once I learned how to do operations and write scripts I was hooked on handling files in that fashion.