If your DE or WM disappeared, what would you switch to?

General Discussions
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Imagine you wake up and your desktop environment (DE) or Window Manager (WM) just doesn’t exist anymore. Never did. :eyes:

The major desktops: GNOME, KDE Plasma, Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon, etc. And on the window manager side: i3, Sway, Hyprland, bspwm, and the rest.

Erase your daily driver DE and its ancestors or derivatives:

If you live in GNOME, GNOME never existed, which also wipes out anything built on it. Cinnamon people, gone. MATE folks, you’re out too since there’s no GNOME 2 to fork from. COSMIC desktop also gone!

If you’re a tiling WM person, erase your daily driver and its ancestors/clones.

Where do you end up instead, and why?

For me this one’s pretty easy since I recently switched to Xfce.

I was satisfied with GNOME except for cadence matching. My issue was that I run rolling distros (Debian testing) and almost every bit of breakage I’d hit traced back to GNOME.

Xfce just stays out of the way due to much slower updates and less frequent new features or changes. But, if Xfce didn’t exist, I’d end up right back on GNOME!

What about you? If your DE or WM vanished from existence, where would you have most likely ended up?

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If your distro disappeared, what would you switch to?
Weekly Forum Summary
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That is always a bit of a tricky one for me—I love the power and simplicity of a DE such as MATE or Xfce, but I also appreciate the modernity of GNOME or KDE (such as Wayland support). I genuinely wouldn’t know! I think I prefer the GTK ecosystem of apps, but still…

I currently run Fedora GNOME on my main build, but Debian MATE is looking very attractively towards me. So perhaps that could be my alternative—I think I’d try that out first if Fedora and GNOME were to disappear.

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If your distro disappeared, what would you switch to?
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If Mate DE disappeared I’d switched to KDE. KDE is conservative and customisable enough to my taste.

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I’d go to XFCE for a DE, I finally figured out how to get rid of the bottom bar.But I have no idea what I’d do for a WM, lightDM is wonderful and has never ever given me issues. I guess I’d have to Google and try what ever is out there.

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if sway dies I’ll use mango :mango:

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Most of my Linux life I’ve been on XFCE (Xubuntu until last year, and Mint XFCE starting this year), so I’d switch to something similar, simple, lightweight, that runs well on old hardware, like MATE, which I’ve been on from 2018 to 2022.

If both XFCE and MATE disappeared… well, I don’t know. I like Gome’s sleek and modern look, but it’s not my first choice, or my second.
I loved KDE’s looks but never worked well on any of my old computers.
Cinnamon, I don’t like it. Looks like a cheap Gnome.

Having said all that… well, in the end, it’s as it has always been, when you can’t have what you’d like, you’ve got to get used to what you can get (and no, I’m not talking about life here :laughing:), so I’d pick either Gnome or KDE, the one that works on my computer. Right now, that would be Gnome; it would take me some time to get used to it, but I think I’d be allright.

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Using Cinnmon but I’ve tried KDE Plasma on a couple distros. There is a lot I like about Plazma and I was almost swayed to convert but ended up coming back to Cinnamon. Cinnamon is not fancy; it is just functional and comfortable.

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