Weird and Wonderfull DE's?

There are a gazillion Linux distros, even if most of them are chips from the big old blocks. Some really niche and very weird.

But when it comes to DE’s they tend to be more then a tad conformist. The Mac influenced “lookers” like Pantheon, Deepin, and such, and the windows lookalikes, Cinnamon, Mate, and others.

There there something out of the box thinking out there that I’ve missed. I mean, why not something that looks like FileLight cascading from the the middle in sub categories, just to suggest something odd?

I’m thinking UI as well as general appearance. Please hit me with your best, and worst DE’s.

More than half the D.E.'s are “forked” or “based on” GNOME. :rofl:

Kidding aside, I was very bored when I wanted to get far away from Cinnamon and MATE, to see what LXQt was like. Also really wanted to play with RebornOS for a few days with Trinity but was denied. I was supposed to see for myself why China was dumped for India for the Ubuntu flavors LOL, because that UKUI to me looks very much like KDE Plasma. I don’t take Wikipedia’s word saying it was forked from MATE.

The only thing I didn’t like from Moksha is that “forward” mouse click on desktop. That is a big fat nope for me. Also I expect anything that calls itself a desktop be able to respond to the “special” function keys for screen brightness and audio volume control. So many XFCE implementations fail, especially Salix while I tried it during the fall last year. Also for me must have touchpad settings like EndeavourOS with LXQt, period. I despise touchpad scrolling and smooth-scrolling of file manager entries.

Mis dos centavos. :moneybag:

Ever tried Enlightenment?

Here let’s try to use sugar

Random drop, ROX

https://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/about_rox.html

Fyne Desktop

The one I wish had caught on used the left SIDE bar of each window for displaying the kind of info often in a titlebar, including the min/max/close buttons. This makes so much sense for wide screens and laptops) that it surprises it died so quickly…

XFCE with an option would be first class!

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The “fynedesk” looks interesting… but it hasn’t been updated in two years. Not like “the flow of Arch”. I.E. find somebody to maintain it, while there is nobody in favor of something “already there” and “more mature” like TDE! :eyes:

Top 5:

Gnome
Plasma
Cinnamon
Xfce
Mate

Bottom 5:
Pantheon
Fluxbox
UKUI
Deepin
Enlightenment

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Thanks for the suggestions, and sorry for the late reply. It’s winter school brake, and the flat is infested by handymen and relatives.

I got some never even heard of DE’s that I’ll look in to.

Being rather content using Plasma, a switch is unlikely. What it boils down to, is me being to lazy right now to get myself into tweaking a WM precisely to my liking. :sweat_smile:

Because I was denied three times by RebornOS with TDE, I seriously considered trying out one called Regolith, it’s the first time I read there is such a desktop. But I have to tolerate yet another fork or based on GNOME…

Also not coming near Pop! OS and that Cosmic thing. I was scared about what a few people said too about UKUI and because Kylin was kicked out of being an Ubuntu flavor. :confused:

A complete surprise here: Unity (the Ubuntu desktop before Canonical got tired of maintaining it and moved to GNOME) is excellent. It is thoughtfully done and it takes unusually little effort to do things - the keyboard and mouse work closely together.

Its problem is that it was scarcely maintained for a few years and some functionality became obsolete, but Ubuntu Unity have been doing an excellent job in picking it up and modernising it.

(It is also purple by default).

I only use two (they play together nicely): dwm and Plasma.

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That’s what I did, but for Freespire “Focal” LTS. Couldn’t make anything useful out of it. It’s not what I call “desktop environment”, now I regret even mentioning it. Don’t know what would be the appeal, I guess another choice.

For me,

  • KDE is most wonderful DE, which is full of wonders !
  • GNOME is most weird DE, as I felt very hard to use it and customize it !


Here, I don’t mean to offensively attack GNOME, just I shared how I felt about it.

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Weird and wonderful, I don’t know, but I’m kinda liking Wayfire right now. (Compiz inspired.)