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What is the best alternative to GNOME?
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LXDM
All
7
Experiences
Pros
5
Cons
2
Top
Pro
Fast and fluent
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Con
Requires Xorg-server
Currently LXDM does not support wayland.
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Pro
Works with Nvidia
Works well with Nvidia.
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Con
Depends on GTK and its dependencies
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Pro
Only two dependencies
Only needs GTK and Xorg-Server.
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Pro
GTK2 and GTK3 versions
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Pro
Works well on USB
A full install of arch on live USB works well on many computers with no text issues with LXDM.
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Experiences
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42
5
KDE Plasma
All
15
Experiences
Pros
11
Cons
3
Specs
Top
Pro
Has a file manager that provides a good balance between power and simplicity
Included file manager provides several icon, list and detail views to choose from along with features such as tabs, bookmarks, tagging, previews and metadata, network file access, bluetooth file transfers to/from devices and excellent removable storage integration while remaining fast and easy to use.
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Con
Stability problems
Under certain conditions, most of KDE's components can be highly sensitive to race conditions, which leads to KDE applications frequently crashing, and, on rare occasion, kdeinit itself locking up.
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Pro
Highly flexible
There are many customization options and possibilities to tweak the desktop, including widgets.
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Con
Perceived clunkyness and slowness
Compared to other options, KDE is still perceived slow. Especially, the desktop takes a few seconds to login. Mouse pointer can feel sluggish, or laggy, on older systems.
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Pro
Looks beautiful
The design of the three built-in desktop themes; Air, Breeze, and Oxygen, are very beautiful to some.
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Con
HiDPI support is great
One can even synchronize the login screen to scale with the rest of the DE
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Pro
Adheres to standards
Standards adherence allows for interoperability and shared technology for X Window System desktops, with similar Wayland support being worked on. Applications not written with Plasma in mind work very well in Plasma as a result. The development team has also been instrumental in standard creation and adoption such as NETWM, X11 clipboard, icon themes, mimetype handling, application menu standardization, system tray protocols and notifications and more.
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Pro
Keyboard friendly
Nearly all actions can be driven with keyboard commands. Window management, including effects such as desktop overviews, can be triggered with a keyboard control (or mouse gesture) and some even support filtering results (such as windows shown) by typing. The KRunner tool (default keybinding: Alt+F2 or Alt+Space) provides searching local files, online sources, unit conversions, math and more all from a keyboard driven interface.
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Pro
Comes with a suite of powerful applications
Plasma Desktop generally comes packaged with a full set of applications to get users started, including a file manager (Dolphin), advanced file manager and browser (Konqueror), image and document viewers (Gwenview, Okular), the Calligra office suite, CD and DVD authoring (K3b) and dozens more. The desktop can be installed and used without these applications, but they add significant value for many people.
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Pro
Integrated advanced search
Plasma Desktop comes with an integration search system that makes it easy to find local files, emails, contacts, events and more. The file manager supports tagging and rating files as well as full-content searching and the KRunner command window and the Milou desktop widget makes searching for files, emails, applications and other content by name, subject, category, tag, fulltext, etc. very simple. It does this with essentially no noticeable interference with day-to-day usage of the computer, thanks to the scheduling built into the backend system (Baloo).
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Pro
Multi-device "convergence"
Plasma Desktop provides seamless "zero config" integration of your Android device with your laptop and desktop machines via KDE Connect. Phone calls, SMS messages, cross-device copy and paste, media remote control, cursor control and more are supported. The technology that Plasma Desktop is built on, simply called "Plasma", also provides interfaces for phones, tablets, netbooks, and media centers in addition to the desktop. These additional interfaces use the same underlying frameworks and therefore work well together and have a unified feel to them. They also support a common set of applications across them which adapt to the input methods and screen sizes.
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Pro
Great HiDPI support
Scales well with laptop and big home theater screen simultaneously.
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Pro
Bunch of coherent applications
What make plasma so nice is the galaxy of apps, sharing same look and feel, configuration and behaviour.
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Pro
KDE is an evolution on the classic desktop model
KDE 4 is a great evolution on the classic Win95/Gnome/XFCE approach. It's moving in innovative directions while respecting the classic metaphors.
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Specs
License:
GPL, LGPL, MIT, X11, BSD
Main Usage:
AIO desktop environment
Programming Language:
mostly C++
Widget Toolkit:
Qt
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139
33
Wayfire
All
9
Experiences
Pros
4
Cons
4
Specs
Top
Pro
Plugin approach
The usage of a plugin system allows for a lot of customisability.
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Top
Con
Less configurable compared to x11 counterparts
The borders and title bars are less customizable. Outside colour change nothing else is possible. Plugin approach is a plus but as of now, no known plugin is available to change the appearance of window decoration. Firedecor is a good option but seems deprecated as it doesn't match the current Wayfire version.
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Pro
Nice blur feature
The blur plugin makes this compositor look nice.
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Con
Dependency issues
Hard to match builds with correct wlroots version. Building is difficult because wlroots version is either greater or lesser than the required version.
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Pro
Fastest compositor with earth.google.com/web
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Con
Plugins require working wayfire to build but with each update, the plugin becomes incompatible and unbuildable
The case with firedecor.
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Top
Pro
Optional tiling
Wayfire has a basic tiling extension built in, and more advanced third party plugins like this one are available.
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Top
Con
Cut/paste not reliable
Sometimes it works, sometimes not. But most of the time not.
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Specs
License:
MIT
Type:
stacking, tiling
Programming Language:
C++
Compositor Library:
wlroots
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Experiences
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54
7
UKUI
All
7
Experiences
Pros
3
Cons
3
Specs
Top
Pro
Simplified MATE
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Con
Not fully translated
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Top
Pro
Nice feel
It's more like Windows 8 but besides that, it looks great.
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Top
Con
UI isn't optimized for lower end pc/laptops
Super slow UI that could take 3-6 seconds to popup. Gnome was slow but UKUI was very sluggish in comparison.
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Top
Pro
Stylish
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Con
Looks like Windows 8
It just looks like Windows 8.
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Specs
License:
GPL
Price:
Free
Programming Language:
C
Widget Toolkit:
GTK
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Experiences
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16
4
Elementary OS
All
28
Experiences
Pros
10
Cons
17
Specs
Top
Con
UI doesn't let you change anything
Every installation of elementaryOS looks exactly like the same.
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Pro
UI design consistency
Excellent uniformity between all the stock application and an overall extremely clean design with simple animations.
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Top
Con
Old base and applications
The slow release schedule makes the applications outdated. It drags behind Ubuntu LTS (on which it's based) which itself drags behind Ubuntu which is often still quite far behind Arch for example.
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Top
Pro
Lightweight & fast
Runs well on limited-resources hardware, including netbooks or chromebooks.
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Top
Con
Outdated or bad default applications
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Pro
Built on Ubuntu
Built on Ubuntu LTS with all its qualities and support.
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Con
Poor Linux community reputation
The devs of elementary OS feel anyone not paying for their Ubuntu respin are not worthy of using it. Which upset a good bit of people. Obviously the core dev team have issues with their community outreach and PR.
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Pro
If you like MacOSX the UI/UX is similar
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Con
Quite buggy
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Pro
Extremely user-friendly
This distribution promises you a very tailored user experience and it does deliver on that promise. The developers provide you with a custom desktop environment and a set of neat programs. And the whole desktop looks simply gorgeous.
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Top
Con
Very slow development cycle
Elementary does not offer any release date for their stable releases going more with an "it's done when it's done" attitude. Making depending on newer apps a difficulty as well as a poor choice for those that need consistent release schedules for their OS.
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Top
Pro
Active Google+ community
There is a place where Elementary users can ask their questions and usually get answers pretty quickly. Not only by the other users, but the devs are pretty active themselves, often engaging in the discussions on the hows, whys, and plans of the OS.
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Con
Not very configurable
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Pro
Simplicity, limited configurability
Sane defaults with less confusion for new users.
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Top
Con
The desktop doesn't let you to put icons by default
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Pro
Consistent development practices
All Elementary apps are written in Vala and hosted on Launchpad, and there are standard APIs such as contractor for applications to interact with one another. This is different from most distros, in which apps are written in a variety of languages. This design decision makes it easy to get started developing for Elementary and to understand how the various pieces fit together.
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Con
Limited and outdated packages
Packages can be very outdated, and many can't be installed from official repos.
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Top
Pro
A dedicated StackExchange site
Elementary OS has a dedicated StackExchange site where users can easily find answers to common questions.
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Top
Con
Doesn't support 32-bit hardwares anymore
One can install pantheon DE from new ubuntu's repo but Elementry OS is not making new ISO's nor is it supporting them. It makes confuzzled to new users.
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Top
Pro
With new tweak tools customisation is not a problem
Now the OS is amazingly customisable
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Con
Upper panel requires extra spaces
The upper panel in Elementary OS requires more space. This can be a problem for computers with small monitors.
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Top
Con
Emacs doesn't work
Emacs crashes due to a partial gnome library update.
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Top
Con
Heavy animations
It has some animations that don‘t run well on older hardware.
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Top
Con
Window control button placement may be unintuitive to some
elementary OS has window controls on the left side of the window. It may be less intuitive to users coming from other operating systems that put window controls on the right.
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Top
Con
No proprietary driver installer
Elementary OS removed the driver installer of Ubuntu.
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Top
Con
Problems with basic functions
Problems often arise with functions like keyboard layout and touchpad.
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Con
Boring UI
It can be very boring.
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Specs
Based On:
Debian>Ubuntu
Default Desktop Environment:
Pantheon
Init-System:
Systemd
Main Usage:
macOS-like Desktop, Showcase for the Pantheon Destop
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308
Ubuntu Budgie
All
12
Experiences
Pros
6
Cons
5
Specs
Top
Pro
User-friendly interface
Good interface on Budgie and a great approach on Ubuntu.
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Top
Con
Can be slow and bloated
May be preferable for new users, but for those who want a minimal system it can be rather slow and comes with many preinstalled applications.
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Top
Pro
Nightshift
Ubuntu Mate doesn’t have this and it’s really easy on the eyes when working at night.
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Top
Con
Has Wi-Fi issues
Asks for Wi-Fi password continuously.
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Top
Pro
Minimal installation gives a new look and feel to what a reliable Os should be
LibreOffice may be exploited and used to attack you but a minimal installation keeps the stalkers at bay.
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Top
Con
Bad Experience after an update
Had a bad experience after an update and then I gave up.
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Top
Pro
Improved Wifi stability with update
Improved wifi stability with 5.15 update.
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Top
Con
Cannot customize the panel but then you get a more reliable system
A lot of us like to have a power button , restart button and other frequently used apps in our top panel but with Budgie you can’t really customize this but in return you get a great system.
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Top
Pro
Additional themes
No need for external theme sources that may affect how you use your OS. All your favorite distributions can be mimicked.
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Top
Con
It is only completely good if you install it separately rather than on another OS
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Top
Pro
Safe updates
Updates are stable so far.
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Specs
Based On:
Ubuntu
Default Desktop Environment:
Budgie
Package Manager:
Debian Package Manager
Main Usage:
UBuntu with preinstalled Moksha Desktop
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Experiences
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167
43
Android-x86
All
8
Experiences
Pros
5
Cons
2
Specs
Top
Pro
It's a complete port of Android to x86
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Con
Slow performance
Runs very slow which is not efficient.
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Top
Pro
Has Bluetooth & WiFi support
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Con
Short list of supported devices
Currently it's tested on only the following devices: ASUS Eee PCs/Laptops Viewsonic Viewpad 10 Dell Inspiron Mini Duo Samsung Q1U Viliv S5 Lenovo ThinkPad x61 Tablet Check them out, download a build and try it for yourself, read their forums and see what is presently happening, from the SurfacePRO 3 work in progress to the older Asus T100 ongoing work and many other PC's, Laptop, 2-in-1's, the older Surface 2, Dell XPS 12, Dell Venue 8, HP Stream, Sony Viao and many others. AOSP KitKat is their present released product, Lollipop version 5.1.1 is their present development cycle. There are builds available for either.
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Pro
Actively developed
Since 2009 the pet project of running Android on a PC by a highly respected developer, has gathered many developer contributions from the open source community...and in 2015 they are still going strong and delivering. Contributors are welcomed and needed for ongoing development work, any donations are accepted.
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Pro
Stable device support
Runs on more devices than any other available Android on a PC product presently available, KitKat, Lollipop, all open source.
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Pro
Open source
Using Open Source Mesa for GPU / Video and presently up to Linux Kernel 4.0.6, with some Kernel 4.1 test builds available from contributors....
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Specs
Based On:
Android Open Source Project
Default Desktop Environment:
Android dalla
Init-System:
Android init
Release Schedule:
N/A
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Experiences
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