What are the best UNIX-like desktop environments with high DPI support for retina displays?

Programming Language:C

Widget Toolkit:GTK

Type:stacking

Some aspects are still unpolished and lack features - the gnome design team works well, but seems to not be taking input from the outside world. See More

Top Con

Some areas are unpolished and lack features

Top Pro

Extensible

Gnome Extensions offers an easy way to extend the built-in functionality. See More

LovelyGatumdag's Experience

complete desktop environment See More

Top Con

Extension system is basically unsupported

Backward compatibility is not guaranteed and extensions seems like second class citizens in the GNOME environment. See More

Top Pro

Simple and easy to use

GNOME 3 has been designed to make it simple and easy to use. Press a button to view your open windows, launch applications or check if you have new messages. See More

Top Con

Slow

GNOME 3 desktop environment is kinda slow on some Linux distributions. See More

Top Pro

Touchscreen friendly

It works well with any touchscreen-enabled system, including newer laptops, even to the point of including a well-designed on-screen keyboard. See More

Top Con

Limited customization

To modify anything beyond the wallpaper requires third-party software. See More

Top Pro

Very productive

With a clean layout and well-thought keyboard shortcuts, Gnome 3 is simply the best for people looking to be productive with their computer. See More

Top Con

Extensions can break whole Gnome desktop

Gnome extensions have a lot of freedom to customize the desktop, which means that extensions can break your desktop leaving you unable to use your computer. Also extensions can significantly slow down the whole desktop. See More

Top Pro

Online account management

GNOME 3 integrates with your online accounts, so that all your data can be accessed from the same place. See More

Top Con

Extension system is weakly integrated into the environment

Backward compatibility is not guaranteed and extensions seems like second class citizens in the GNOME environment. See More

Top Pro

Keyboard friendly

It's (mostly) usable without touching a mouse, so you can keep your hands on the keyboard. Shortcuts can be defined in the gnome setting. There are even more shortcuts available when using the gesetting or dconf tool, e.g. switch to desktop 5 to 9. See More

Top Con

Continuous customization and extension issues

They need to sort out their continuous customization and extension issues, which are why many people still prefer KDE or other Desktop environments. See More

Top Pro

Powerful search

A powerful search feature lets you access all your work from one place. See More

Top Con

Remove more features than add

Top Pro

Does not get in the way

GNOME 3 lets you do the things you want without getting in the way. It won't bother you or badger you with demands, and it has been designed to help you comfortably deal with notifications. See More

Top Con

Heavy on RAM

It is the DE that needs the biggest amount of RAM. See More

Top Pro

Adheres to standards

Allowing for interoperability and shared technology for X Window System desktops. See More

Top Con

Tightly coupled to its window manager

If you're looking to run an alternative window manager, like XMonad, you're pretty much out of luck. See More

Top Pro

Gnome-Tweak-Tool and Extensions are great

Gnome may seem bland out of the box but, the Gnome-Tweak-Tool is awesome. The Gnome-Tweak-Tool allows for easy desktop tweaks and other control functionality, and that these features can be activated with just a click. See More

Top Con

Some GUI controls are much larger than on other desktops

This is wasting screen space on non-HiDPI monitors. See More

Top Pro

Fallback mode offers a classic look

For people looking for older, more classic looks, Fallback mode offers just that. Ubuntu users can have this option by installing a package called "GNOME-Session-Fallback." In the future to be released GNOME 3.8, the Fallback Mode will not be included, so this is really not a long-term solution. See More

Top Con

You can't put icons on the desktop

Top Pro

Easy theming

Changing the look (and feel) of Gnome Shell is easy, shell theme, icon, windows and graphical elements (gtk). individually for each user. Mostly its installing some packages or unpacking some archive to a themes folder and using selecting the new theme in e.g. gnome-tweak-tool. There a lot of really good theme on deviantart. See More

Top Con

Native Gnome dock isn't scalable

The native Gnome dock isn't scalable, which means if you want to change its size you have to download a customized theme for the shell and hope it has the appearance you want. Honestly again just like the icon issue it wastes way too much of the screen on high resolution monitors. See More

Top Pro

Highly customisable

Gnome Extensions offers an easy way to extend the built-in functionality. See More

Top Con

Poor 'drag and drop into application' capability

Difficult to drag and drop a file into an open application. See More

Top Pro

Beautiful interface

Very very beautiful interface See More

Top Con

Full screen start menu

This may be fine if your screen is really small, but on modern fullhd desktop it looks ugly and distracting. In addition to very ineffective display of items on screen - much more could be placed on one screen if there were less empty space around and between icons See More

Top Pro

It just works

You don't ever "need" tweaks. Unless your device is too outdated, it just works out of the box. Touchscreen, 4k TV, anything just works. See More

Top Con

Longtime support is hard since every few years GNOME changes its own standards

Everytime something is complete GNOME breaks itself: Icon naming changes almost every 3 years : once gtk icons were named stock_edit then gtk-edit then edit-edit and currently edit-edit-symbolic App icons change also every few years currently they get renamed to an android like scheme eg: org.gnome.Photos.svg instead of gnome-photos.svg however this breaks all common standards esp. since filenames on linux are case sensitive. GNOMEShell extension also break on almost every release. Currently Gtk3 has been stabilized however they are already working on GTK4 and 5 so in the worst case your desktop will need to run and support 4 GTK-toolkits at the same time. See More

Top Pro

Wayland support

Gnome is the first desktop environment that uses Wayland as default instead of X server. X server is only optional currently. See More

Top Con

Icon scalability and sorting

The icons in the "apps view" area don't have any additional sizes, the current ones are much too large to be effective for the screen space they use. Also, there is no native way to sort them in Gnome, only a very limited extension. Which means you're pretty much always better off using the search bar if you can. See More

Top Pro

Great for high dpi displays

Adjustable scaling factor makes it great for high-resolution laptops and far away TVs. See More

Top Con

Made for touchscreens

It's very uncomfortable to use with a mouse and a keyboard. See More

Top Con

No support for fractional scaling

Unlike Qt, GTK has no support for it. See More

Top Con

Has several dead userspace features that are supplemented by community supported exstentions

Unfortunately the gnome updates often break these exstentions. An example of that would be GSConnect. See More

Top Con

Default alt-tab behaviour is cute but extremely annoying for fast keyboard users

Top Con

Has several dead userspace features that are supplemented by community supported extensions

Has several dead projects that are supplemented by community supported extensions. Unfortunately, the gnome updates often break these extensions. Example: GSConnect. See More

Top Con

Rather insane method of wallpaper slideshows

Most DEs and WMs allow the user to simply point to a directory, and use pictures from there. Gnome 3 requires the rather asinine idea of building an XML file to accomplish the same thing. See More

Top Con

Depends on systemd

Some people don't like systemd but it is part of most modern distros anyway. See More

Top Con

Some settings are not where the user would expect it

E.g. it is not possible to change the keyboard auto-repeat delay or rate from the usual All Setting > Keyboard like, for example, in Unity. Many settings are considered "tweaks" and require installing a separate utility to adjust. Further still, some settings are buried in a dconf database. See More

Top Con

Malfunctions Unity desktop

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. See More

score 33 · Answer 2

KDE Plasma

Top Pro

Has a file manager that provides a good balance between power and simplicity

Top 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. See More

IndustriousDekla's Experience

Outstanding, even for old machines. See More

Specs

License:GPL, LGPL, MIT, X11, BSD

Programming Language:mostly C++

Widget Toolkit:Qt

Main Usage:AIO desktop environment

There are many customization options and possibilities to tweak the desktop, including widgets. See More

Top Pro

Highly flexible

Top 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. See More

Jesse V's Experience

Gnome does not have a consistent look/feel with HiDpi(3200x1800- lenovo yoga 2 pro). I find that KDE is more consistent because it enforces the title bars which give a consistent look to all applications. Gnome is great though, just not as mature as KDE. KDE also give access to a lot more system information than does Gnome. But HiDPI win, belongs to KDE. I am using KDE right now because of this, but will check with Gnome 3.3 for any changes. If no changes, then I will stay with KDE. It feels more complete, although the workflow of Gnome, is smoother, and newer. See More

Top Pro

Looks beautiful

The design of the three built-in desktop themes; Air, Breeze, and Oxygen, are very beautiful to some. See More

Top Con

HiDPI support is great

One can even synchronize the login screen to scale with the rest of the DE See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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). See More

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Great HiDPI support

Scales well with laptop and big home theater screen simultaneously. See More

Top Pro

Bunch of coherent applications

What make plasma so nice is the galaxy of apps, sharing same look and feel, configuration and behaviour. See More

Top 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. See More

Cinnamon uses a traditional desktop userflow that most computer users are familiar with. See More

score 46 · Answer 3

Cinnamon

Top Pro

Fast, elegant and stable interface

Top Con

Sometimes freezes

This can get really annoying. See More

WorthyTellervo's Experience

It just works an most older computer I put it on. See More

Specs

Intended for large-screen, non-touch devices that extend traditional concepts with functionality and good looking aesthetic. See More

Top Pro

Designed for traditional desktops

Top Con

Shell-style ≠ widget-style

The Cinnamon-shell is unable the use the current GTK style for its interface thus making it hard to get a consistent user interface. See More

Top Pro

Very well supported

Has a great community and is very well supported through Linux Mint website. See More

Top Con

Not touchscreen friendly

The menu can not be scrolled using the touchscreen, it is hard to resize windows. See More

Top Pro

The keyboard shortcut design is very friendly to users with Windows background

Your win+E, win+D etc are still working after migrated to cinnamon from Windows. See More

Top Con

Lacks vertical panels

There are no vertical panels in Cinnamon. See More

Top Pro

Nice themes and extensions

Very easy to make this desktop your own both in terms of looks and functionality. See More

Top Con

Crashes

Despite Cinnamon being on its stable second version it still crashes a lot, ranging from plugins all the way to drivers. See More

Top Pro

Actively developed with useful new features in each release

E.g vertical panels are now there. See More

Top Con

Cumbersome main menu

Main menu takes a lot of space and is cumbersome to navigate See More

Top Pro

Very easy to customize

It's very easy to customize using the built in theme and applet tools. It automatically installs themes and desktop/panel applets for you, so you mostly won't have to go search online for them. See More

Top Con

No traditional menu available

The only menus you'll get are big fat XP-like menus any X11 window manager has a better menu available than cinnamon. See More

Top Pro

Can run apps meant for any other desktop environment

Cinnamon can run any app meant for any other DE, meaning the user can have apps for XFCE and KDE simultaneously and they will run as smoothly as if they're being run in the corresponding DE. See More

Top Con

Few themes

Rather than using actual GTK theming, Cinnamon appears to vye for its own strange infrastructure that isn't compatible across any other desktop. See More

Top Pro

Cinnamon provides control of icon placement on multiple monitors

Cinnamon provides control of the placement of desktop icons on multiple monitor setups. This feature has been buggy, but in my testing of Linux Mint 19, this feature appeared to be stable. Thus, Cinnamon joins KDE and Windows in enabling this capability. For example, in a setup with 2 or 3 monitors, you can put the desktop icons on the right-hand monitor. With other DEs, the icons always move to the left-hand monitor. See More

Top Pro

Traditional desktop with the recent features

Cinnamon is a modern desktop that has the latest features, but at the same time it sticks to its way as a classic desktop and ignores trends/hypes like client side decorations or popovermenus. See More

Top Pro

best for users coming from Windows

Will look familiar to windows users making the transition easier See More

Top Pro

Stable DE

Top Pro

Lots of downloadable free themes

Plenty of themes, ready and free to be downloaded and applied with just a couple of clicks in a few seconds, with the file sizes mostly around 0.5 - 1MB. See More

Top Pro

Conservative look

Looks like Windows XP, Vista/7. See More

Top Pro

You can disable overlay scrollbars

Cinnamon has a GUI option for that. See More

Top Pro

Titlebars

It does not use GNOME's Client Side decorations. See More

Top Pro

Best for users coming from Windows

Will look familiar to windows users making the transition easier. See More

Top Pro

You can easily get it to look like Windows

You can get it to closely look and behave like Windows with considerable ease. This is a good thing for those switching from Windows, because it gives them a familiar environment, cutting down on the learning curve a bit. Among the popular DE's this is the one that gets you closest with great ease. See More

Top Pro

Vertical panel already available

Xfce is using many custom-made GTK widgets(like an custom pathbar, GtkDialog headers, Xfceiconview and more), while this makes it different to other GTK desktops it also breaks certain GTK styles that don't have workarounds for those widgets. See More

score 9 · Answer 4

Xfce

Top Pro

Low resource usage combined with flexible configuration

Top Con

Uses many custom GTK widgets

Specs

License:GPL, LGPL, BSD

It loads and executes applications fast, while conserving system resources. See More

Top Pro

Designed for productivity

Top Con

Missing some basic functionality for a desktop environment

Xfce is missing essential functionality like a file-archiver or a polkit-client, so you have to find alternatives for those applications (eg: by stealing them from MATE or GNOME, however this adds additional dependencies that will bloat Xfce). See More

Top Pro

HiDPI support

After release 4.14 Xfce supports HiDPI. See More

Top Con

Now with Client Side decorations

Recent development versions introduce GNOME-ClientSideDecorations for some Xfce applications. Like on GNOME this breaks the overall consistency of the desktop. Eg: GNOME and some Xfce applicaions will use GNOME based interfaces like CSD's and popovers while the most other will use normal titlebars and popupmenus. This also makes it almost impossible to use Xfce >=4.15 components on traditional Window Managers like: Openbox, Fluxbox or IceWM. See More

Top Pro

A true UNIX Desktop Environment

Xfce adheres to the UNIX philosophy, which means it strives for being modular, minimal and expandable. This makes it very much customizable. You can make it as minimal as you want and as heavyweight as you want depending on the features and modules/plugins you use. See More

Top Con

Will become more interconnected an less modular

Isn't as modular anymore as it was 10 years ago. In the future (4.16) they will also introduce GTK Client Side Decorations to all setting dialogs so you will have some problems with using a different Window manager or when using xfce components outside of Xfce/GNOME. See More

Top Pro

Highly customizable

Xfce offers plenty of settings, and even things like theming XFWM is a simple task (it's just a handful of images.) Many possible permutations of window colors, borders, fonts, etc. Compositing can make it look downright sexy. See More

Top Con

Xfwm theming is limited

For example, unlike metacity/marco/miffin it does not support different styles for window types. See More

Top Con

One pixel wide window borders

The non-configurable, one pixel wide window borders make resizing difficult. Work-arounds exist but those are clunky at best. See More

Deepin DE has some blur designs which make it very beautiful. See More

score 22 · Answer 5

Deepin DE

Top Pro

Very beautiful

Top Con

Theming can be a bit temperamental

Some of the apps included within this desktop environment, like for example the Deepin file explorer, don't respect the system theme set within the main settings menu and require you to manually set the theme they use within the application itself. They also can only either be set to the default light or dark theme included within this DDE making third party theming options limited. See More

Specs

License:Mostly GPL

Programming Language:Mostly C++

Widget Toolkit:Qt, Deepin Tool Kit

Top Pro

Looks good out of the box

No configs madness to worry about. Just install it, load it and you're off to the races See More

Top Con

Awkward software selection

Like Google Chrome, WPS Office. Chromium is buggy, Firefox is outdated, the calculator is too basic. See More

Top Pro

Has good HiDPI support.

Top Pro

Easy to use

Deepin DE is very simple. See More

Top Pro

Has a Windows-like and Mac-like interface

Easily switchable between the two, as well. See More

Top Pro

A modern DE for Linux

Deepin is the first DE for Linux which looks and acts like a modern environment. Basically, Deepin succede where Gnome 3 failed See More

Top Pro

Touchscreen friendly

Top Pro

Stable

Top Pro

Available for a lot of distros

Deepin DE is currently supported on Deepin OS, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Arch Linux, Gentoo, Fedora, Sparky Linux, Puppy Linux, Pardus, Antergos and Manjaro. See More

Top Pro

Quite lightweight

Top Pro

Includes quality programs

It has some of its own programs which are quite beautiful. See More

Main Usage:UBuntu with preinstalled Moksha Desktop

score 5 · Answer 6

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

score 7 · Answer 7

Ubuntu Budgie

All

1

Specs

Based On:Ubuntu

Default Desktop Environment:Budgie

Package Manager:Debian Package Manager

enligtenment ships with good scale settings See More

score 4 · Answer 8

Enlightenment

rc's Experience

Specs

License:BSD

Programming Language:C

Widget Toolkit:EFL

Main Usage:Lightweight and stylish desktop shell

Login Screen does not use the used scale factor See More

score 1 · Answer 9

GNOME

TranquilAcratopotes's Experience

Specs

This is only officially available for elementaryOS, and is not tested to work beyond it. It works decently on Arch Linux but this is not accessible to the majority of users. See More

score 11 · Answer 10

Pantheon

Top Pro

Looks great

Has a great UI. See More

Top Con

Not available for major Linux distributions

Capuccino 's Experience

Pantheon is amalgamation of the dream "If Linux DE makers had an eye for simple design". It feels and works good, but being limited to its own distro, elemntaryOS, makes it a deal breaker. See More

Specs

Easy to use and easy to configure, there is almost nothing that the developers did not think of to creat a top-notch user experience. See More

Programming Language:C

Widget Toolkit:GTK

Languages:Vala

Top Pro

Slick, smooth desktop environment

Top Con

Few configuration options

It is pretty bare-bones on a stock install, but further configuration options can be added through various official tweak tools. See More

Top Pro

Simple, clean aesthetic

Nonintrusive and easy to overview workspace. See More

Top Con

Not ideal for enterprise environments

As it has no set release date, and no set support and/or EOL dates, that makes it a not so good choice for enterprises managing a number of machines where such dates are important to know before hand. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

Pantheon is light on system resources, giving it the advantage of being able run well on a multitude of setups. See More

Top Con

Slow maintenance

Any significant updates come with new release, which usually takes 2-3 years. Hence gets obsolete with current software. See More

Top Pro

Smooth, subtle animations

Nearly everything is animated, but it's not over the top. See More

Top Con

No icons on desktop

Top Pro

Developers understand high DPI

The developers understand and develop the software with HIDPI in mind. Check out their articles on the topic. See More

Top Con

Buggy

Top Con

Too simple

Good for people who want a plug and play simple Desktop Environment. But for a multitasking / entertainment / cutting edge or Gaming Rig this is not the answer. See More

MATE does not permit placement of desktop icons on the monitor of choice in a multiple monitor setup. For example, with 2 or 3 monitors, with MATE you cannot place the desktop icons on the right-hand monitor -- they always move to the left-hand monitor. By contrast, you have control of desktop icon placement on multiple monitors with Cinnamon, KDE, and Windows. See More

score 6 · Answer 11

MATE

Top Pro

No disturbing eyecandies

Top Con

MATE lacks customized desktop icon placement on multiple monitors

CourageousGoibniu's Experience

Mate has the best scaling: Appearance > Fonts > Details > dpi See More

Specs

All MATE 1.24 components are ported to GTK3 and fully support HiDPI. See More

Top Pro

Full HiDPI support

Top Con

No official forum

Instead of having an official forum, users are redirected to their distributions support forums. You might get help at the Ubuntu MATE or Linux Mint forums but they are still mainly for distribution specific issues. See More

Top Pro

Has menu icons

MATE has icons in every popupmenu which makes navigating through them very fast. See More

Top Con

Not really user friendly

Some apps have really rough edges, for example: Caja: by open an SVG-file and get a Dialog with 4 Buttons(Run in Terminal, Display, Cancel & Run) at least two of them make no sense. You can also right click on them to choose the application, however your default application for that filetype is not on this list. Panel: Empty panel applets are about 1px wide so you really cant resize or move them to organize your panel. See More

Top Pro

Pays its developpers

Thanks to the Patreon page, money is collected to pay for the developpers maintaining and adding new features to MATE See More

Top Pro

Traditional desktop experience

The goal of MATE is to maintain the look and feel of Gnome 2, while maintaining compatibility with Gnome 3. To that end, it has also forked and renamed many of Gnome's core applications. It benefits from the years of work and polish that have gone into Gnome project, and has already been adopted as one of the default environments for Linux Mint. See More

Top Pro

Many new features

The MATE team added plenty of power user features that were perviously rejected by the GNOME team. See More

Top Pro

Very stable

Code base is very stable and virtually bug-free. See More

Top Pro

Has window borders

Other than GNOME or Xfce, MATE has not introduced OSX-alike Client Side decorations See More

Sane defaults with less confusion for new users. See More

score 3 · Answer 12

Elementary OS

Top Pro

Simplicity, limited configurability

Top Con

Quite buggy

Specs

Main Usage:macOS-like Desktop, Showcase for the Pantheon Destop

Based On:Debian>Ubuntu

Default Desktop Environment:Pantheon

Origin:UK

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. See More

Top Pro

Extremely user-friendly

Top Con

The desktop doesn't let you to put icons by default

Top Pro

UI design consistency

Excellent uniformity between all the stock application and an overall extremely clean design with simple animations. See More