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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.