Sway and Gnome

The latter is mostly for other family members. But I like both.

I’ve been a GNOME user ever since I made the switch to Linux. Though, like literally over the last couple of days, I’ve been DE/WM-hopping.

The first address was Sway, but it felt (kinda) archaic… And while I’m positive that I’d be able to make it work, I wasn’t entirely sure if it was worth the effort 😅.

So, not long after, I couldn’t bear it anymore and switched to COSMIC. So far, I’m pretty content with it. GNOME required about half a dozen extensions to properly bend to my will. With COSMIC, it pretty much gets there without any external add-ons.

People tend to dislike this, but I LOVE gnome. It runs a lil heavy, but damn it’s clean, smooth, fast, easy & decluttered.

No dot files, no config, and it’s intuitive

sway. I tried hyprland, but it was unable to switch between different maximized windows (monocle layout). There was a way, but it triggered a resize on every window switch, which was slow and annoying. I don’t know if it’s perhaps been fixed since then.

GNOME. I love the workspace management and simplicity

Sway, it’s fast, pretty, easy to customize, and can do headless displays to stream with Sunshine.

Gnome with the Forge extension for window tiling

i3

With alacritty, qutebrowser, neovim and LibreWolf. I use my custom dmenu-based utilities for things like launching apps, locking (with slock), controlling (ie. postponing :D) redshift and music player and opening bookmarks, links and searches. Thunar is the most DE-like app I use but being comfortable with Bash i use Thunar just for certain tasks like organizing files like photos. (For quick text edits, I sometimes prefer Mousepad. For screenshots it’s slock+maim.)

I don’t “rice”, I just set some color schemes years ago and use simple wallpaper (which I rarely see.) And keep everything as minimal and out of way as possible.

(I don’t care about Wayland unless I’m somehow forced to. I mean, some of my utils depend on X11 for things like clipboard access but I suppose it could be fixed easily nowadays. However X11 works fine for me so if it ain’t broken…)

I have KDE Plasma, Hyprland, and Mango (WM) installed.

Of the three, I use Mango most of the time, and KDE Plasma sometimes. Hyprland, I’ve kept because most of my config was for it, and I’m still currently porting them to Mango. Most of the dotfiles are in their own areas, though I’ve mostly piggybacked on Plasma components. One area that I’ve got some trouble with is program theming. KDE Plasma has its own, Qt has its own (which is different from the KDE Plasma one), and GTK is yet another. I’ve decided that the best way to deal with it is to make them look as similar as I can, so that whether I’m on Mango, Hyprland, or KDE Plasma, my programs will look the same–except for the presence of window titlebars, which Mango doesn’t show, Hyprland shows via a plugin, but KDE Plasma does show.

I used Ubuntu’s implementation of Gnome back when I started dabbling with Linux some time ago. I didn’t bother theming it. And then I moved to XFCE when that underpowered machine I was using couldn’t handle Ubuntu’s Gnome without feeling like it’s swimming in molasses. XFCE is nice and configurable in contrast, and I didn’t have much to complain about. However, I found its configuration back then to be quite troublesome, especially as I tried tweaking my own bars and panels.

I then moved to KDE Plasma when I got my current machine. It was pretty okay out of the box, but coming from a tweaked XFCE, I couldn’t stop myself from theming it to my liking. Hyprland was introduced to me mid-2024, and I was thrust head-first into configuring it from scratch, no dotfiles to copy from, or pre-made shells to make my experience easier.

At present, Mango won me over by having a decent vertical scrolling layout, as well as the flexibilty of using other layouts on the fly. While I like Hyprland’s level of polish and customizability, and recently have implemented scrolling (both vertical and horizontal), I am staying with Mango if only because I’ve already done the work porting most of my stuff there.

Running mangowm on AerynOS.

Cinnamon

TDE. Solid, familiar, stays out of my way.

Sway

XFCE with Compiz with all the 3D effects enabled lol.

If you want wayland then wayfire is supposed to be the spiritual successor, but it’s still technically beta software.

Cosmic.

Openbox was my favourite, but there’s not a really good Wayland alternative yet so I’ve stuck with KDE for years.

I wanted to try Cosmic so I went to the source with popos and it’s really a good time. I haven’t used a Deb/Ubuntu base since the Crunchbang days but this is good and it seems there is a Cosmic update pushed through every week.