EOS with KDE, GNOME, XFCE, or another, which is more stable or recommended according to your experience?

General system Newbie
1

Hi friends.

I have several questions about the desktops to use on EOS. I’ve always used EOS with KDE Wayland, and I’ve never had any problems. After upgrading to KDE 6.0, my Wayland broke and now I have to fix it (surely it will be quick and easy to fix, and won’t be a problem).

I’m currently using x11org and I’m having problems with freezes in Firefox and menus disappearing in Dolphin. This has made me wonder if there are more stable desktops than KDE, in terms of performance, stability, etc.

(I know that the problem is with x11org, and that probably when I fix Wayland, it will work fine again)

My pc is: gtx 1050 ti, i5-3470, 16 gb ram, gigabyte motherboard.

I mostly use EOS for gaming on Steam and Lutris, and rendering in Blender, and I thought there might be a desktop that works better in these cases (I don’t know if the CPU/GPU brand can affect the performance of the desktop).

My favorite desktops visually are KDE and XFCE (I also like GNOME although it is different), but I don’t know what positive and negative things each one has, and it is also possible that there are better desktops than these two, and that is why I would like to know your experiences with EOS desktops.

Also our friends on our forum told me that there are “window desktops”, like i3, but they seem a little difficult for me to use, at least for now.

Any recommendation or advice you want to give me is welcome, thanks in advance friends!

1 Like
2

All DEs have issues when they go through massive changes which are rare.

Of the three you mentioned xfce is the most stable because it undergoes the least amount of changes. However, when they moved to gtk3, there were, unsurprisingly, a lot of bugs introduced.

Gnome releases, when they contain major changes(which is uncommon) also see a big increase in bugs.

The shift that KDE is going through right now is a massive change under the covers. Problems should be expected.

  1. Choose whichever DE you enjoy using the most.
  2. When a DE goes through a major release, don’t update immediately. Be patient and let some of the bugs settle.
8 Likes
3

I use XFCE because, as @Kresimir says, it has sharp edges by default.
It was the default choice when I installed EOS back in 2021. I kept the default eos theming. I’m happy with it because I never have to think about it (which is exactly what it’s supposed to achieve :sweat_smile:) …so far at least.

that should be pinned somewhere :rofl:

3 Likes
4

Try the Live ISO from some distributions which ship different DE:s as their flagships.

GNOME: Fedora (with Wayland as default)
Cinnamon: Linux Mint (with experimental Wayland support)

I haven’t looked at Xfce, Mate for a long time so you would need to look that up.

Decide for yourself which one you like the most and is most suited for your workflow.

4 Likes
5

Most stable is probably lxde and MATE since they have been (arguably) feature complete for a long long time. Then probably Cinnamon. The big 3 are probably least “stable” since they are more actively maintained. Xfce, Kde and GNOME in that order imo.

Best experience if you want wayland is probably gnome. . . then kde since they are the only two who ship it now by default.

2 Likes
6

order of being “big”, being maintained, or of stability ?

2 Likes
7

Stability. lxde is pretty much openbox. MATE hasn’t changed much in years. Cinnamon is minimal and follows Mint which is mostly new users and very careful about major changes. xfce is the most stable of the big 3, but not immune to issues. KDE is historically better than gnome since gnome releases every 6 months like clock work. . . but kde maybe just breaks in such a significant fashion it’s almost on par anyways.

2 Likes
8

Now that you mentioned LXDE… What is its future going to be? Is it going to co-exist with LXQT or get abandoned in due time? Especially gathering from the very limited dev team.

1 Like
9

If x11 truly disappears, it will likely also.

I can’t imagine it actually goes away for many years to come still.

1 Like
10

Still, it’s not a matter of our expectations or imagination, but if the few devs will keep on maintaining it, with their main focus on LXQT. This I don’t know, since I’m not following them to know first hand. :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like
11

Where there’s demand, especially if it includes money, x11 will be here for awhile still.

1 Like
12

Thank you all for your responses friends.

I like KDE and XFCE, but I have read and seen many Linux YouTubers who say that KDE runs smoother in games. I don’t know if it’s true but Steam uses KDE too, so I’ll stick with it for now.

By the way, does the latest EndeavourOS ISO come with KDE by default? The previous one came with XFCE.

About x11 or wayland, I don’t know what the main difference is, but I see many users who support wayland and others who support x11. My wayland is doing a little better, but I don’t really know if it’s because I use Nvidia.

I would like my next PC to be full AMD, so I don’t know if that will positively affect my EndeavourOS.

13

Yes.

2 Likes
14

I wouldn’t listen to the majority of these guys, I have came across a total of 1 review that was on point and explained changes nicely. The others seem unable to file bug reports and seem to hope their audience will do it or magically their issues will be fixed if they say it there

1 Like
15

I’ve been told that so many times by so many people that I’m going to have to stop doing it! :rofl:

It’s the fault of YouTube, which knows that I like Linux, and only recommends these types of videos to me (well, and cat videos too). :joy:

1 Like
16

Yer I still watch them but more for learning what people are doing wrong, they tend to show many great examples of this

3 Likes
17

Thank you all for your responses, friends. I have decided to stay with KDE for now because it is the one I like the most, although XFCE is my 2nd favorite.

I think I can have KDE + XFCE on EOS (not sure), but I don’t know if this could cause some incompatibility or something, so for now I will use KDE which is my favorite.

I was unlucky that I updated a few hours after KDE 6.0 was released (I didn’t even know it would be released this year), and my EOS suffered some problems xD.

I also have a bad habit of updating EOS every 2 days or before installing a package, and I think I should only update every 1 or 2 weeks or something like that. :sweat:

18

The problem isn’t that you were unlucky the problem is you didn’t do research and read the updates and what they were. This is 90% of most issues I see when it comes to updates/upgrades is people don’t bother doing the research to see whats being done they just blindly accept.

again the problem isn’t frequency but the reading and researching of the updates.

2 Likes
19

You’re right! I never look at what updates I download, because I think they will all improve my EOS.

That day it is true that there were many more updates than normal, but I didn’t even read all the names. I know I know that some of the packages were called “kde” or “qt” or something like that, but I didn’t pay attention to it.

It is also true that I do not know how to identify most of the packages by name. :sweat:

But, I think KDE 7.0 will be out in a couple of years, right? So there will be no problems until then x’D.

I mean, there shouldn’t be other updates this important for EOS with KDE (I don’t know) I use very few packages, and from now on I will watch which packages are installed, so I should have no problems.

So far the only big problem I’ve had this entire year was with that update. xP

20

I would not count on that. I’m sure there will be problems as they go though fixing problems that they have found out about since the official release.

There are many important components to the OS besides its DE. There will be major updates for all sorts of things like Pyton and other languages updates that have nothing to do with the DE or EnOS.

Also just a note it doesn’t matter the amount of packages its what they depend on to work. ie … runtime librarys.

1 Like