Finally managed to kill the procrastination and switch today. It was smooth and simple. My life is almost entirely unchanged by this step.

  • Klajan@lemmy.zip
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    8 days ago

    The way I always heard it described (with the default setup) for the most popular DE’s:

    • KDE Plasma is the most “windows like” DE by default. Layout and most common behaviour will be very similar
    • GNOME is more oriented towards a macOS like style. It doesn’t allow as much customisation out of the box as others.
    • XFCE is also a solid choice, not many integrated applications (KDE have their own version for many things like file explorer or search)

    There a lot of others like LXQT, options that are not the “usual” Desktop Environment e.g. tiling window managers like Hyprland.

    A lot of these can be installed in parallel and you can then choose which to start on the login manager, if you want to experiment which you like more.

    There is also the choice of display protocol (X11 or Wayland), with X11 being the older more widely supported option. Not all DE’s will work on Wayland.

    • mholiv@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      I have two notes.

      If you want a fancy tiling manager I would recommend Niri + Noctalia. Hyperland is run by a right wing chud who was such a chud he was banned from the free desktop foundation for being such a chud. The dude is a 4chan type who thinks he/him is normal and she/her is political to the point where the admins overwrote people’s profile pronouns to who/cares.

      As for x11 vs wayland i would strongly recommend picking wayland. Its the default on all mainstream Linux distros now days and is massively more secure.

      Under X11 any application can just keylog and screen record your whole desktop no questions asked. With Wayland apps need permission to do things like record your screen or intercept keystrokes.

      3-4 years ago there where some reasons to not use Wayland . But nowadays these major issues have been resolved. That and those specific x11 desktops tend to have Wayland versions that by coincidence generally speaking have more active communities. (i.e. i3 vs the Wayland equivalent sway)

      • Klajan@lemmy.zip
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        7 days ago

        Never said that it can’t be customised.

        From my experience it is just not build in by default and not quite as easy.

        But that was also years ago, so I am by no means a good source here.