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💡 Newskategorie: Linux Tipps
🔗 Quelle: reddit.com
TL;DR at end
Hey, I saw another post on this sub from someone explaining their experience with Linux and why they switched back to Windows, so I guess I'll put my opinion in here as well.
I first got exposed to Linux exactly a year ago when I needed to revive a crappy 2012 laptop. I put Linux Mint on it and it's not even a contest - on the Windows partition the PC is barely alive and struggles to even open the start menu, and on Linux Mint it's pretty much at factory new performance. I then used the laptop for a while, and I thought "hey, this Linux thing is pretty cool and interesting, why not put it on my main PC?". And this is where my real Linux adventure started. Hopped to all sorts of distros and stayed with Fedora for a good couple months because it ticked all my boxes, but today I'm writing this post from Windows. Why?
To put it simply, the Linux desktop doesn't work out for me.
I really like Linux and I prefer it to Windows even now in terms of productivity - package managers are a *huge* time saver when I want to get software, for example. But in the end, what drove me back to Windows was the desktop experience. Right now it sounds vague, so let me elaborate and express my thoughts on a few desktop environments.
GNOME - I heavily used it back in my Fedora 33 days, and it was actually a pretty solid experience! It took a long time for me to get used to it though, and I thought it was an interface meant for tablets at first. But even on a desktop computer I could make it work and be efficient with it. Comes GNOME 40... The majority seems to like GNOME 40, but for me personally, it was the complete opposite. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like the GNOME devs just went all out to optimise the touchpad gesture experience and left the classic desktop users behind. I know GNOME extensions exist, but I find it like working on borrowed time. The extensions will sooner or later break, or get abandoned by the developer entirely. With GNOME 40 making me less efficient and my views conflicting with the views of the GNOME developers, I abandoned this desktop entirely. I know using LTS distros is an option, but Fedora is my go-to distro that I'm the most comfortable with.
KDE - I really, *really* wanted to like this desktop, but the technical issues with it (or Nvidia depending on your perspective) completely ruined it for me. My main PC has an Nvidia GPU, and I tried KDE numerous times with it on variety of distros - Arch, Kubuntu, openSUSE and so on. All of these attempts ended with me just switching back to whatever desktop I was using at the time. Why so? Because I kept experiencing issues like choppy and inconsistent animations(one time they're smooth and the other time they lag like hell), desktop notifications slowing the entire desktop down. Applying a theme other than Breeze seemed to make these issues even worse. I tried what seems like every Nvidia exclusive fix for KDE under the sun - enabling KWin triple buffering with a config file, forcing full composition pipeline to name a couple.. Still no cigar. While KDE looks stunning for me, the fact that it doesn't play with Nvidia just put me off. I know there are thousands of people running KDE + Nvidia out there who have none of these issues, so probably just my rotten luck /shrug
Cinnamon - Great, but at the moment it seems to have memory leaks that the developers are working on, and the fact that there are no plans for a Wayland implementation is kind of concerning, project longevity wise(sounds funny coming from an Nvidia user, but just thinking forward here :D).
Xfce - great as well, but it has some minor annoyances like Whisker menu making keybinds involving the Super key a pain to get right(that is, if you bind Whisker to Super), and dragging on the window borders to resize windows can be rather annoying to do at times, since you need to place the cursor really accurately in order to actually start resizing. I heard that's related to the theme you're using though /shrug. Hilarious nitpicks aside, the most concerning thing of all for me is Xfce seemingly on a path to introduce more and more GNOME elements to it, which is what I'm trying to get away from. For example, the implementation of CSD in Xfce 4.16 was a controversial move and the lead developer was pretty assertive about it, which makes me worried for the future Xfce releases. Same concern for Wayland as with Cinnamon, but I feel like it's not a valid argument right now as there's still quite some time left until Wayland is widely used and adopted.
As for the other desktops, MATE seems cool, but the customisation doesn't seem all that great? I couldn't find an option to change or remove the MATE logo from the standard Windows-like menu for example, unless I'm blind.. Also, when I tried MATE on an Ubuntu MATE VM, it was unstable and things like the Menu crashed often. Perhaps better on bare metal? Let me know, MATE enthusiasts :) Pantheon is another desktop that seems nice and on a genuinely good development path, but it only seems properly usable on elementaryOS itself and a Mac-like workflow isn't for me.
And that's pretty much it. None of the desktops on Linux right now seem to work well with me, so I decided to just take a break and switch back to Windows for the time being, due to it having the smoothest desktop experience in my particular case. In the end, a smooth desktop experience is important for me on any OS, and Linux currently doesn't provide me with that, mostly thanks to Nvidia... I hope I'll return at some point, because Linux is still a technically better OS for me. Feel free to share your opinions and perhaps even correct some of my statements, because I think I definitely slipped up explaining things somewhere :P
TL;DR: I find that none of the Linux desktops simply work out for me, taking a break on Windows because of it.
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