Spent lots of time with Gnome 2.
In Dec 2024 I got hooked in Hyprland on Arch and have a cool rice for it. But I’ve tried KDE on desktop now with Parrot OS since Plasma is popular. Still need to find some cool dot files or rice it myself.
I’ve noticed SwayFX getting lots of love lately. I might use that as an option with Plasma but am afraid of conflicts. I’m excited about it since Linux has now officially replaced windows on my gaming rig, which is the very last MS computer left in my house.
For me: Gnome + extensions.
The default Gnome feels way too locked down to me, and I don’t like some of the choices. But, with the right extensions “locked down” becomes “simplified enough to get out of your way”.
same. also its the only DE i know of thats useable with touchscreens. KDE would work too, buts its too overloaded for my taste and the OSK (On Screen Keyboard) is far inferior to the options of Gnome Extensions.
i wish Cosmic DE would be usable with touchscreens tho.
plasma mobile works on more than just handhelds, and you’ll find it in fedora and debian repos (among others, i’m sure).
true, but i didnt like that as much as gnome. its just a personal preference
Yeah, I’ve got a couple extensions as well. I tried out Bazzite and liked some of the changes they made, but wanted something closer to stock Gnome. Ended up just installing Silverblue and adding a few of those extensions back, to taste.
How do you fare with the restrictions of immutable distro? That’s feels scary to me, but I’m a control freak.
I actually like the assurance of immutability. The main downside is that there’s just less documentation on how to do things, since it’s a very non-standard configuration for a distro.
It’s also annoying having to reboot every time I layer a new package into the system image, but I try to avoid that as much as possible and haven’t had to do it recently.
Adjusting to Flatpaks has also presented some challenges. In theory, I really like what Flatpaks offer in terms of app-level isolation, but some things are still rough around the edges. I’ve encountered at least one app that didn’t obey the system’s dark mode theming… Also, they still haven’t quite figured out a good way to handle GPU drivers, so you can run into compatibility issues between the usage driver in the runtime and the kernel driver in the system image.
In my case, I’ve just had to update and restart the application when this happens, but it might cause problems if you try to roll back the OS image after already updating all your runtimes (resulting in a newer userspace driver trying to talk to an outdated kernel driver).