If you’re going to spend hours every day staring at a screen, how much does experience matter? Not yours. The experience behind the software you’re trusting with your workflow. I’ve written before about choosing the best Linux distro, and one thing I keep coming back to is longevity. Distributions like Debian, Fedora, Arch, and Ubuntu… continue reading.
Curious where people disagree on this one. I spent a few days trying to poke holes in my own rankings before publishing, so I’m sure then I probably made more holes.
Main takeaways:
The best desktop environment is the one whose tradeoffs align with your priorities.
And if you have the time or skills to contribute, consider supporting the smaller community-driven projects on this list. It’s the same spirit as buying local.
And yes, included are a few window managers alongside desktop environments. At the end of the day, they’re all tools we use with the same end goals on desktop, so it felt fair to compare them side by side.
Drop your thoughts below. How would you rank these, or what would you remove or add? If you’d add something, how would it score across the five criteria?
No other window manager treats configuration as full-blown programming.
This is not true, there are several. AwesomeWM, Xmonad, MangoWM, dwm, dwl, SomeWM.
Anyway I agree with the relatively low setup to productivity score with Qtile but this is not the whole story. Being able to fully customize your environment without limits is big for productivity, given enough imagination. Custom dynamic tiling layouts are big, using i3 with or without autotiling is a bit of a chore by comparison.
Good catch. I meant Python specifically, but even in this space, it’s always safer to say ‘few’ than ‘no other.’ Will update. Thanks!
Agreed on TTP which is why I wrote:
It’s the most hackable window manager on this list, and for the right user, that’s worth every minute of setup time.
I appreciate you taking the time to add feedback. The ranking for sure will differ for everyone by some degree but hopefully this is a reminder for us all of how important of a decision the DE/WM is. They can make or break our distro experience.
At least, the article is about “your picks”. Not everyone’s picks.
Firstly, for me, gnome is the most terrible Linux DE out there…
Secondly, I3WM is not a DE, but WM
Thirdly, someone said the Qtile, is the most hackable in the list (can
be, but not as a general WM)…
The WM world is to big to assert such statements as “most hackable”…
Throughout the years I have used, i3wm, sway, xmonad, etc…
But, for some years now I have been using a not very popular WM that,
in my opinion, is the best one and I should say the best one after
trying all those WMs and DEs. Its name is StumpWM and because I use
Emacs nearly for everything, StumpWM is well integrated with it… It
is written in Lisp (the king programming language, according to
RMS…
And in the end, I’ve just sticked to XFce4 (DE) and StumpWM (WM)
If any of you want to know more about it, have a look on here:
I definitely dropped the ball by not even mentioning StumpWM in the list of notable mentions. Thanks for sharing. First released 2017, so will be considered in a future update I’m sure. .
