What's your favourite GUI / Window Manager and why?

Hi,

I've recently been playing around with different GUIs more extensively. I used Gnome 3 on my server / laptop and main rig, as I find it's UX to be unparalleled and it really speeds up my workflow.

Now I have been playing with KDE on my server, and I gotta say, once configured it's rather nice aswell.

 

Which GUI are you using and more importantly why?

I'd like to know, and maybe find some I havn't tried yet :D

 

KDE has been my favorite over quite a few distro's. i would say Win XP is second. Gnome never attracted to me, as im not a huge fan of the layout.

Enlightenment is one of my favorites for Linux but it can be a bit of a pain to learn.

BTW, you mean a Window Manager not GUI right? I mean a WM is a type of GUI, but GUI is such a broad term that the interface for the firefox webbrowser is a GUI as well.

I prefer Xfce. I like that it is fairly lightweight, pretty customisable, widely supported, and looks decent out of the box.

Added Window Manager to the title - you're right GUI is rather broad ^^

I like Cinnamon. However Gnome is what I end up with at the end of the day. It just works (for the most part).

Everybody gives gnome a hard time, but it really is amazing. A very get out of the way and let me do my work kind of interface. Kde is good too, but it depends on what distro your running it on. Opensuse has optimized kde in many ways, very much like fedora has optimized gnome. Its all preference.

I really like KDE but i have rather limited exp with the different types.

I like Gnome and i3.

Actually, SUSE has started focusing on Gnome as a DE. It's implementation is right up there with Fedora. I don't see why other people give Gnome a hard time either. It is not as good as Gnome 2 in terms of functionality, but it's not as bad as Microsoft's junk they call a DE.

BSPWM. it isn't the easiest to configure or anything, but it just uses bash scripts, so far easier than having to learn haskell or something.

GRIPS: not wayland

With you on that, just bearly upgraded to e19(from 17) and enabled the tiling2 plugin, I really like how it lets you decide on what monitor and space it should be active on.

Tried a lot of them, I still am.

My favorites so far are GNOME with shellshape (to make it tiling) and quite a few other extensions (static workspaces being crucial) and awesome. While shellshape is adequate, it just cannot compare to a real tiling window manager like awesome.

I am also going to try KDE5 once all the apps are ported to Qt5, I'm curious how fast it actually is. And xmonad (another tiling) after I learn Haskell.

Gnome 3 with Simple Dock shell extension and custom icon pack.

Unity... Not lightweight by any means, but it gets out of the way and has one huge killer-feature - HUD.

KDE has won me over with plasma 5. The default themes are visually pleasing and they have cleaned up a lot of the more esoteric work flows of KDE 4.x.

I also just installed Plasma 5.2 and I still can't stop myself from drooling.

This desktop looks gorgeous and is very fast due to being entirely GPU accelerated.

I just have to get my act together and stop smiling every time I look on the screen ^^

The visual design group around Jens Reuterberg really nailed the design.

Apart from the looks and the performance I really like the ability to customise it exactly to my liking without having to use extensions that break every time I upgrade to a new desktop version.

I know this many options frighten new users, but the standard set-up is already fine for them as well.

I just like to be able to get (graphical) access to all available tweeks if I want to.

Anyone interested can check out the release announcement here:

https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.2.0.php

 

Awesome WM, because its tiling (AWESOME!) and easy to configure. :)

Mate/Gnome2.32

Why is becasue I've been using computers since Windows 1.0 and the Apple IIe, it's the lightest GUI for Linux that has all of the features I'm looking for with none of the cruft I don't need with a layout that just makes sense after 20 years of Windows and Mac OS with a sprinkling of BeOS and OS/2 mixed in.

KDE because I am a long time Windows user so KDE is a very familiar to me