Artix Linux => Applications & Software => Topic started by: asterix on 11 September 2025, 05:04:46
Title: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: asterix on 11 September 2025, 05:04:46
I wanted to know which Window Manager or Desktop Environment do you use as your daily driver? This is just to get a gist of the most favored DE in use.
KDE Plasma
GNOME
XFCe
LXQT/LXDE
MATE
Cinnamon
Others
Please do give your responses and if possible a few pointers on benefits that you accrue on using it. For example XFCe one of the point can be its low system usage or light system usage. For KDE plasma it can be for its features, massive application libraries, etc. And so on.
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: Zendjinn on 11 September 2025, 05:11:23
Mainly XFCE. It's light but has almost everything I want. Thunar is excellent and it's a very mature suite and getting better all the time. Otherwise it's icewm, fluxbox or openbox.
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: tintin on 11 September 2025, 07:06:54
XFCE: stable, lightweight, practical and beautifully configurable.
But since I manage a lot of photos, often mixed with other types of files, I add the Dolphin file manager.
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: Mic44 on 11 September 2025, 08:08:27
XFCE for its simplicity. 8)
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: rayburn on 11 September 2025, 09:35:05
XFCE or Openbox mainly for my machines, always try and keep as light as possible.
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: dpx on 11 September 2025, 10:33:35
dwm as daily driver because I don't want to spend time on arranging windows. Fully set hyprland as backup in case something goes terribly wrong with X. I don't use it but it is ready, practically replica of my dwm setup.
Tiling WM is not for everybody but I am using this or that one for 10+ years back.
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: cds on 11 September 2025, 12:12:25
dwm for daily while from time to time I still boot into my original i3 config
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: redfrell on 11 September 2025, 14:32:02
I use herbstluftwm almost exclusively, though occasionally a dynamic tiling WM like FrankenWM
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: K0rpZ0uth on 11 September 2025, 14:44:35
Currently, XFCE4/XFWM4. XFCE4 was my first ever Desktop Environment so I have a bit of an attachment to it.
I was dicking around with suckless software before migrating from runit to openrc, ended up creating a cozy gui driven environment that's superior to out-of-the-box Manjaro. I felt like I was missing EndeavourOS and Linux Mint (NOT SYSTEMD) for the most superficial reasons and decided to somewhat recreate their desktop flow, minus flatpaks. Pamac runs better on an Arch Linux derivative that doesn't miss the point of Arch Linux, whodathunkit.
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: Shoun2137 on 11 September 2025, 20:14:11
i3wm, but configured as tabbed workflow instead of the default tiling + lxqt portals, because that's like the only sane filepicker on linux desktop. It's just comfy scrolling (with mouse) through the windows.
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: XyzzyX on 11 September 2025, 20:37:10
Awesome. I need a tiling wm to place out the windows for me. Otherwise it just becomes a mess with all windows open on top of each other and I can't find anything in that mess, and I open new windows all the time and soon I have 15 terminals and 10 windows of thunar, and a browser in the background, and hm, a text editor also, somewhere, if I could just find it, and... I haven't tried any other tiling wm yet.
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: kixik on 12 September 2025, 04:32:57
i3wm, but configured as tabbed workflow instead of the default tiling + lxqt portals, because that's like the only sane filepicker on linux desktop. It's just comfy scrolling (with mouse) through the windows.
I use i3wm as well, but no desktop portals, actually when under wayland, it was required for screen sharing as well as pipewire and dbus of course, and I never really liked the idea.
So for a combo, i3wm (tabbed layout), polybar, rofi, dunst, picom, udiskie, udiskie-dmenu, bemenu-x11, pinentry-bemenu, ... , and I don't miss a DE. Actually never had, I used years back plain fluxbox without it's menu and without its toolbar, with similar environment, but after finding sway and therefore i3wm support tabbed layout I started using them and found the experience even better than with stacking WMs. I remove the titlebar from apps if they come with them (for me CSD all the way or no side decorations).
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: asterix on 12 September 2025, 04:57:33
dwm as daily driver because I don't want to spend time on arranging windows. Fully set hyprland as backup in case something goes terribly wrong with X. I don't use it but it is ready, practically replica of my dwm setup.
Tiling WM is not for everybody but I am using this or that one for 10+ years back.
Why is Tiling WM not for everybody? And are you using dwm on Artix?
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: asterix on 12 September 2025, 05:13:12
So not many are using Cinnamon, MATE and KDE Plasma. Interesting.
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: Shoun2137 on 12 September 2025, 05:30:07
So not many are using Cinnamon, MATE and KDE Plasma. Interesting.
Frankly, you’re asking people on forums, which are mostly powerusers. Powerusers that have aversion to the current status quo of linux desktop as a whole, mainly the way leading toolkits (ugh, gtk...) and DEs (well, GNOME...) are going... GNOME was mentioned, because even if it's dying and users are fleeing, it's still has a say in most of the FD things and also maintains a lot of useless frameworks that most of use don't need, but those are forced upon.
Keep in mind that the normie doesn’t really care about what they run, they just consume. If you’re trying to gauge the userbase, it would be much better to ask the devs directly for the download statistics, i.e., how many people downloaded each ISO. That way, we’d know which one is the most popular.
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: rayburn on 12 September 2025, 09:39:02
So not many are using Cinnamon, MATE and KDE Plasma. Interesting.
Keep in mind that the normie doesn’t really care about what they run, they just consume. If you’re trying to gauge the userbase, it would be much better to ask the devs directly for the download statistics, i.e., how many people downloaded each ISO. That way, we’d know which one is the most popular.
But what about people who download from torrents? Is there a method of counting downloads that way?
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: dpx on 12 September 2025, 10:46:27
it would be much better to ask the devs directly for the download statistics, i.e., how many people downloaded each ISO. That way, we’d know which one is the most popular.
Probably not precise also, I always install XFCE then get my dwm setup from backups. Maybe i3 would show by looking at downloads but not dwm or Xmonad.
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: dpx on 12 September 2025, 10:50:35
Why is Tiling WM not for everybody? And are you using dwm on Artix?
With dwm you need to change and compile C code. With Xmonad you need to do the same with Haskell. Maybe i3 is simpler to set but also not being pure tiling WM.
Window arrangement with tiling WM is something that is either perfect or completely wrong for any random user. I spend most of the day in terminal/vim/emacs so dwm works perfectly. If I would spend the day in gimp or blender I would probably use XFCE.
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: Worm_Jim on 12 September 2025, 15:31:19
I use Pantheon. IMHO, of course, but I think that pantheon is a healthy person's gnome. You can see for yourself what a smoker's gnome looks like :)
I am happy with its appearance (gtk theme, cursor, icons, fonts and icons on the panel). There are a minimum of settings here, but there is everything I need. The speed of work on my almost 13-year-old equipment is also satisfactory. All I did after installation was set up wallpaper, added several key combinations for launching programs and scripts, added several things to autorun. The disadvantages include the tie to gnome and systemd (because of systemd, not everything works as it should) and of course bugs, where without them...
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: yoyo55 on 12 September 2025, 17:30:30
1.) Compiz 2.) Openbox 3.) Xfce Cool thing about Compiz is, that it can be started by xinit and has some kind of session management - I guess.
It is very efficient, very stylish, very easily configurable and has all the tools needed. Would it be against the rules here, posting ""desktop "" "screencasts" with a hemp leaf or a brown cigarre shaped mouse cursour ? never know
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: gripped on 12 September 2025, 22:22:09
I use KDE because I like bloat and bugs. Why fix bugs when you can add new features nobody wants or asked for ;) I just prefer the QT look and feel over GTK and I've been using it since the KDE 1 beta apart from when KDE 4 first got pushed on us.
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: [email protected] on 12 September 2025, 23:21:57
dwm. I first used Xfce as I'd used it on Arch, but I set up a dwm environment the way I wanted and I'm not going back. Nothing turns me off more than Gnome or Kde.
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: yoyo55 on 13 September 2025, 17:59:15
A full blown desktop environment is slowing the system down. You will not notice that on normal usage, but when playing games or other realtime tasks that are tuned for low latency, you want maybe something else then gnome(cinnamon, budgie) or kde. 364 processes open here, thats is still much but a good trade off.
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: gripped on 13 September 2025, 23:51:36
A full blown desktop environment is slowing the system down. You will not notice that on normal usage, but when playing games or other realtime tasks that are tuned for low latency, you want maybe something else then gnome(cinnamon, budgie) or kde. 364 processes open here, thats is still much but a good trade off.
For sure on a low power system.But with enough cores and memory there's not a lot of difference. I've tested it. Big DE vs X11 starting the game directly.
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: yoyo55 on 14 September 2025, 10:50:35
I am no expert,just a user with a lil experience. You are surely right , but my main argument is: when pushing down lantencies, maybe down to 1 ms, then you will notice that everything can disturb the realtime experience: my neighbour, just switching off the light can lead to Xruns in my lowlatency stream. So,I am trying to keep things small and I am trying to avoid complexity: maybe, I will gain some performance advantages that are maybe so small that they can not be measured. But reducing complexity helps too, being your own private sys admin.
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: asterix on 15 September 2025, 04:16:07
So not many are using Cinnamon, MATE and KDE Plasma. Interesting.
Frankly, you’re asking people on forums, which are mostly powerusers. Powerusers that have aversion to the current status quo of linux desktop as a whole, mainly the way leading toolkits (ugh, gtk...) and DEs (well, GNOME...) are going... GNOME was mentioned, because even if it's dying and users are fleeing, it's still has a say in most of the FD things and also maintains a lot of useless frameworks that most of use don't need, but those are forced upon.
Keep in mind that the normie doesn’t really care about what they run, they just consume. If you’re trying to gauge the userbase, it would be much better to ask the devs directly for the download statistics, i.e., how many people downloaded each ISO. That way, we’d know which one is the most popular.
I am looking at various DE/WMs for Artix. I have been doing a bit DE hopping on Artix. From LXQT to MATE to XFCe. And I wanted to know what most of the people running Artix use. But using LXQT/MATE made me realize how much are these environments lacking. For example MATE, which ideally ought to have been the most complete DE, given its heritage of GNOME, does not even have a default calculator app or a clock/timer/stopwatch application installed. And nor is there available specifically built using GTK2.
This is just me get a sense of lay of the land on what is being used.
Yes you a right, most of the people only really care about what they consume.
Going to Devs for numbers of downloads based on different ISO would be interesting to say the least. I will consider that.
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: asterix on 15 September 2025, 04:24:19
I use Pantheon. IMHO, of course, but I think that pantheon is a healthy person's gnome. You can see for yourself what a smoker's gnome looks like :)
I am happy with its appearance (gtk theme, cursor, icons, fonts and icons on the panel). There are a minimum of settings here, but there is everything I need. The speed of work on my almost 13-year-old equipment is also satisfactory. All I did after installation was set up wallpaper, added several key combinations for launching programs and scripts, added several things to autorun. The disadvantages include the tie to gnome and systemd (because of systemd, not everything works as it should) and of course bugs, where without them...
Are you using pantheon desktop from elementary OS on Artix? If yes how did you manage to achieve that? I had assumed that Artix is a Arch based Linux not based on systemd. And Pantheon Desktop requires systemd.
You are using this on a 13-year old system. Is that a desktop or mini-pc or workstation or laptop or netbook or chromebook? Do you use much of GUI based applications or is your work mostly on terminal? My work is typically that requires a lot of GUI. I cannot sustain based only or predominantly on terminal. Can you please share the details of your setup and how it performs?
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: asterix on 15 September 2025, 04:26:41
I use KDE because I like bloat and bugs. Why fix bugs when you can add new features nobody wants or asked for ;) I just prefer the QT look and feel over GTK and I've been using it since the KDE 1 beta apart from when KDE 4 first got pushed on us.
I also love KDE and QT. But KDE has become a bloat. Love its level of customization and eye candy. Just amazing.
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: asterix on 15 September 2025, 04:28:32
1.) Compiz 2.) Openbox 3.) Xfce Cool thing about Compiz is, that it can be started by xinit and has some kind of session management - I guess.
It is very efficient, very stylish, very easily configurable and has all the tools needed. Would it be against the rules here, posting ""desktop "" "screencasts" with a hemp leaf or a brown cigarre shaped mouse cursour ? never know
How did you get Compiz and openbox to run on Artix? Did you install the base ISO and from there went about installing compiz and or openbox?
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: Worm_Jim on 15 September 2025, 05:40:59
I use Pantheon. IMHO, of course, but I think that pantheon is a healthy person's gnome. You can see for yourself what a smoker's gnome looks like :)
I am happy with its appearance (gtk theme, cursor, icons, fonts and icons on the panel). There are a minimum of settings here, but there is everything I need. The speed of work on my almost 13-year-old equipment is also satisfactory. All I did after installation was set up wallpaper, added several key combinations for launching programs and scripts, added several things to autorun. The disadvantages include the tie to gnome and systemd (because of systemd, not everything works as it should) and of course bugs, where without them...
Are you using pantheon desktop from elementary OS on Artix? If yes how did you manage to achieve that? I had assumed that Artix is a Arch based Linux not based on systemd. And Pantheon Desktop requires systemd.
You are using this on a 13-year old system. Is that a desktop or mini-pc or workstation or laptop or netbook or chromebook? Do you use much of GUI based applications or is your work mostly on terminal? My work is typically that requires a lot of GUI. I cannot sustain based only or predominantly on terminal. Can you please share the details of your setup and how it performs?
Yes, Pantheon Shell is a desktop environment that is used in Elementary OS and I use it on Artix, and before that I used it on Arch. There is an article about Pantheon on archwiki (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pantheon), but I had to work: write down all the names of the packages, copy their PKGBUILD's, check if all the dependencies are in the repositories, if the package depends on systemd, if so, you need to find a way to build without it, build the latest available versions, check that everything works correctly. Then I started a virtual machine and built everything again to make sure there were no errors during the build. After I got a fully working environment, I already wrote a post asking to add all the packages to the Artix repositories, especially since I attached all the PKGBUILD's, but the Artist came and published this news (https://forum.artixlinux.org/index.php/topic,7774.0.html), where it says that Pantheon is now available for Artix :)
This is a Lenovo Thinkad X230 laptop, which was released on January 21, 2013 with the configuration: i5-3210m, 16Gb RAM, 512Gb Sata SSD and a 9-cell battery. This is my main device for all tasks. I mainly use programs with a graphical interface, fortunately, I have everything I need, and in the terminal I mainly work with the system or server (maintenance and administration), which happens often. I constantly use ncmpcpp (in the terminal) with mpd, because the native Pantheon player eats up 1Gb of RAM, if I add my music collection of 10Gb, which seems too much to me. The native video player is also weird, so I use mpv, but it has some unpleasant features on my device... The hardest task is programming for Android in IntelliJ IDEA, the laptop copes with it, but 16GB of RAM is still not enough and I have to restart the development environment sometimes, not as often as with 8Gb, but I have to. When watching local videos, reading books in pdf format, simple surfing (with noscript configured in the browser), reading email or listening and editing tags of music files, the laptop works for me for about 6 hours (from 100% to 20%), which is more than enough. That's how it is.
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: yoyo55 on 15 September 2025, 19:12:22
1.) Compiz 2.) Openbox 3.) Xfce Cool thing about Compiz is, that it can be started by xinit and has some kind of session management - I guess.
It is very efficient, very stylish, very easily configurable and has all the tools needed. Would it be against the rules here, posting ""desktop "" "screencasts" with a hemp leaf or a brown cigarre shaped mouse cursour ? never know
How did you get Compiz and openbox to run on Artix? Did you install the base ISO and from there went about installing compiz and or openbox?
Yes an no: each time is a lil different, I am still running Legacy BIOS. Yes, mostly live LXQT which I guess is openbox based. You can use the installer if it works for you, then just stop and remove login manager and start openbox or compiz (fusion-icon) from xinit. The last times I installed not from a base iso but just handpicked the tools - thats Arch Linux Way https://www.youtube.com/@leelanders1317
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: asterix on 16 September 2025, 13:52:30
I tried to go with LXQT, but ran into issues. Basic issues. The Wifi Connection panel would not open up. There was no clock/timer/stopwatch application. Then shifted to MATE. Loved it, but was disappointed by the slow pace of releases and features. Though MATE was better put together and more polished compared to LXQT.
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: clappingsnowdrop on 16 September 2025, 16:39:52
Formerly dwl, now am using dwm because of xlibre. I like that it's minimal enough.
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: yoyo55 on 16 September 2025, 19:57:08
Linux is open: you can install and configure your own setup with handpicked apps. Desktop Environments like KDE, Gnome or LXDE (LXQT) can be setup by installing a meta package or by chosing each app separately. KDE is the environment and plasma are the apps that are all part of KDE. The difference between a custom Desktop experience and a complete desktop environment lies maybe in the session management. Besides this session managment, any other part can be exchanged like the login manager, the panel, the file manager, the theme and also a wifi and network applet. Many Desktop Environments are installing networkmanager and I had problems with that in the past. Connman is foss and it is a new very fast and reliable network manager and in combination with iwd developed by Intel, it is rock stable here.
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: lq on 17 September 2025, 09:40:56
Title: Re: Which Desktop Environment (DE) or Window manager (WM) do you use
Post by: yoyo55 on 17 September 2025, 17:55:03
On every stupid or misleading question about Gnu/Linux in an internet forum, there is some one like me, who wants to be super smart. (joking, partially at least)