KDE Plasma because I'm basic and I wanna get stuff done 👍
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2026
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KDE. I don't even do much to customize it. I think it looks pretty good out of the box.
The only thing I customize is to turn off the floating panel, I just can't stand the small gap on the bottom and the sides. It just looks off to me.
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Niri + Noctalia shell. I find the scrolling tiles to be excellent for my workflow, and the desktop shell feels nice and polished. Plus, Niri supports the Wayland zwlr_layer_shell, which means I can finally use Wallpaper Engine; there's even a Noctalia plugin for it.
Niri has been great for gaming and streaming, so be sure to check it out if you haven't.
I would be hesitant to use anything but KWin with Plasma. They were designed together as a set (like Mutter and Gnome), and I suspect replacing the WM would be no small task.
Do you mind elaborating on that Wallpaper Engine thing and also Natalia shell. What are they? I’m familiar with Niri, but never used it myself. (Not sure I like scrolling logic, I use barebones Sway.)
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KDE Plasma. It's clean, fast, and just works.
I use KDE. I like how easy it is to customize pretty much everything. Like, if I want everything to be green, I can make everything green and no one can stop me.
KDE Plasma all the way, on the desktop, the laptops and the two set top boxes.
KDE Plasma, as it’s most Windows-like and it has lots of cool widgets to add to your desktop Windows 7-style.
I’ve also tried Gnome, but I found it confusing and honestly a bit annoying. Not being able to properly minimise like I’m used to just really throws me off. I do think the visual style is well-designed, though.
I’ve tried Cinnamon as well. I thought it looked a bit too cheap for my taste, at least by default on Mint.
Gnome Vanilla is really not that good. But with Extensions and Gnome Tweaks its usable.
Gnome Tweaks enables the minimize button and Extensions enable pretty much everything one could ask for.
I prefer the simplified UI of Gnome to the thousands of options that KDE offers out of the box. But KDE is a really good DE and i used it without problems over a year.
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Sway
Gnome
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.
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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.
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I'm on Mango, and it's amazing for me. It's well documented, as well as extremely flexible. I love it.
i3
With alacritty, qutebrowser, neovim and LibreWolf. I use my custom dmenu-based utilities for things like launching apps, locking (with slock), controlling (ie. postponing :D) redshift and music player and opening bookmarks, links and searches. Thunar is the most DE-like app I use but being comfortable with Bash i use Thunar just for certain tasks like organizing files like photos. For quick text edits, I sometimes prefer Mousepad. For screenshots it's slop+maim.
I don't "rice", I just set some color schemes years ago and use simple wallpaper (which I rarely see.) And keep everything as minimal and out of way as possible.
(I don't care about Wayland unless I'm somehow forced to. I mean, some of my utils depend on X11 for things like clipboard access but I suppose it could be fixed easily nowadays. However X11 works fine for me so if it ain't broken...)
KDE (on CachyOS)
Lightly customized KDE plasma, it truly is just the best de out there. However when I'm feeling a bit playful and not looking to do actual work or using my laptop without a mouse I do switch over to hyprland sometimes.
Niri
Been on i3wm for 3 4 years now I guess. Also work with sway on some systems.
you can actually see and use my config
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sway. I tried hyprland, but it was unable to switch between different maximized windows (monocle layout). There was a way, but it triggered a resize on every window switch, which was slow and annoying. I don't know if it's perhaps been fixed since then.
People tend to dislike this, but I LOVE gnome. It runs a lil heavy, but damn it's clean, smooth, fast, easy & decluttered.
No dot files, no config, and it's intuitive
hyprland
KDE + Wayland, only changes I made were moving the bar to the left side, changing the applications menue icon, and changing the color of breeze dark to pink
Sway, it's fast, pretty, easy to customize, and can do headless displays to stream with Sunshine.
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Sway and Gnome
The latter is mostly for other family members. But I like both.
kde + wayland on tumbleweed. Wanted to try other things, went for swaywm. NowI found out that krunner and kdeconnect are like 90% of what i need an OS (DE) to do.
I'm using gnome.
Really enjoyed sway but lacked the integration I wanted, KDE before plasma 6 would break all the time and I liked but again lacked integration niri (a scrolling window manager)
Sway, me like simple.
KDE, but only with an extension called kröhnkite for auto tiling. To me a manual stacked window management system is almost unusable. As someone who used tiling window managers for years and lots of KDE based applications, and as KDE was one of the first who worked well in Wayland, I thought to give it a shot. I like it and since then (years by now) stayed on KDE.
For reference, I used Gnome 2 on Ubuntu, made the switch to Unity desktop, then Gnome 3 (and I think Gnome 4 too?, don't remember). Then started experimenting with Regolith, auto tiling for Gnome, and tried out real tiling window managers, until I landed on qtile. Then experimented with Xfce, before finally making the switch to KDE (because of Wayland). Rest is history.
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KDE Plasma with default settings as well.
Cosmic.
Openbox was my favourite, but there's not a really good Wayland alternative yet so I've stuck with KDE for years.
I wanted to try Cosmic so I went to the source with popos and it's really a good time. I haven't used a Deb/Ubuntu base since the Crunchbang days but this is good and it seems there is a Cosmic update pushed through every week.
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Gnome with the Forge extension for window tiling
Running mangowm on AerynOS.
WM: i3, sway, also playing around with dwm
DE: Xfce
I just need basic functionality, and most tiling WMs are fairly similar. i3 vs. Sway is basically the Xorg vs. Wayland question. I like dwm for its absolute minimalism and the fact that you configure it by editing or patching C and recompiling.
Hyprland, specifically with the end4 illogical impulse desktop.
It's pretty and I really like how functional it is, but some recent updates have changed how some of the config files work requiring changes. It's an inconvenience I'm willing to put up with though.
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Cinnamon. It's like a combination of kde and gnome.
I am sorry if my English is bad.
Cinnamon here too. It seems small and fast.
Vanilla KDE on desktop, Niri WM+Noctalia shell on laptop. Firstly, because for some reason I cannot get any touchpad gestures to work on KDE, and secondly because the niri paradigm of horizontal tiling is just perfect for a laptop. I tried to use Gnome for a while before landing on Niri, but the lack of configurability and the reliance on extensions for basic functionality drove me nuts.
Cosmic. It's still a little buggy but getting better.
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