What are the best Linux Desktop Environments for everyday users?

Widget Toolkit:GTK+

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 Pro

Highly customizable

Top Con

Lacks modern design and effects

No support for transparency, effects in opening or closing a file browser, or other effects like cube or cylinder, unlike, say, KDE. See More

IntellectualJatasur's Experience

stable See More

Top Pro

Rock solid stability

Xfce will never be the cause of your crash. See More

Top Con

Looks ugly out of the box

Out of the box, Xfce is the one of the ugliest if not the ugliest DE out there. It definitely can become the most beautiful and gorgeous DE after a bit of tinkering and theming, but the default theme is not that good. See More

ThoughtfulDurius's Experience

ScarFace (aka. Xfce) may not look purdy but it's fast and efficient and that sounds like a PRO, to me. Go Scars, go! See More

Top Pro

Designed for productivity

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

Top Con

Not a full DE

With a pure Xfce environment you cannot do as much as with Gnome or KDE. See More

Nguyễn Văn Trình's Experience

Fast. Good for users See More

Top Pro

Does what it's meant to do easily and efficiently

XFCE is a desktop environment first and foremost, it does not waste time being overly flashy or by being bloated with features. See More

Top Con

Lack of useful tools

ChattyAtaguchu's Experience

I have used with different distros and have not had any problems. 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

Very slow developement

XFCE tends to be extremely slow in it's development as it has been known to span years between major releases. While this means there are not many disturbing changes to the DE, it also means that new features that are requested take some time to appear. See More

Top Pro

Best for newcomers

Any one new to Linux feels comfortable using it. See More

Top Con

Uses many custom GTK widgets

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

Top Pro

Low resource usage combined with flexible configuration

Top Con

Screen tearing issues

The built-in compositor for Xfce does not handle VSync, meaning that it does not address screen tearing for those with Intel integrated graphics. A third party solution will have to be used for those that do want VSync such as using Nvidia proprietary drivers to handle VSync or installing a third party compositor such as Compton. See More

Top Pro

Easily customizable as compared to other DEs

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. See More

Top Pro

Well defined Session Manager

Top Con

No HiDPI support

Since Xfce is still based on GTK2 there is no HiDPI support (scaling UI elements). See More

Top Pro

Works on a wide variety of platforms

Xfce can be installed on several UNIX platforms. It is known to compile on Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Cygwin and MacOS X, on x86, PPC, Sparc, and Alpha. See More

Top Con

Terrible project infrastructure

The whole project is split across various sites so contributing is really hard. You also need to register on every site separately. See More

Top Pro

4.14 has beautiful and functional notifications

Top Con

Not good for different users' locales on one system

When you have users with different personal locales, XfcE has problems using the right locale for the right user. See More

Top Pro

Excellent panel management and selection of panel applets

Xfce provides excellent management of panels and a rich selection of panel applets. See More

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

No slow double click to rename in Thunar

Top Pro

Multifile rename in Thunar

Top Con

Officially is no Longer the Champion of Lightweight Memory Usage

According to multiple credible sources in the Linux world and the KDE developers, XFCE now uses more memory than Plasma 5.17, due to Plasma bringing better and faster updates. Even the XFCE folks admit XFCE is somewhat getting out of hand. I suppose this was tested on a minimal install of Plasma, without the entire KDE ecosystem. So if you are concerned with memory usage and use a "build-it-yourself" distribution like Arch, avoid XFCE and install Plasma by itself. See More

Top Pro

Adheres to standards

A priority of Xfce is adherence to standards, specifically those defined at freedesktop.org allowing for interoperability and shared technology for X Window System desktops. This interoperability is particularly significant for users looking to, e.g., run alternative window managers. See More

Top Con

Too lightweight

Feels too lightweight and doesn't have enough packages and applications. See More

Top Pro

Easy to export or import configurations

Top Con

GConf

It's the same Windows Registry clone as GNOME. See More

Top Con

No sound effect

Xfce does not support freedesktop sound themes. See More

Top Con

Does not support HiDPI

Xfwm for example does not support scaling. See More

Top Con

Poor support

It can take years for the devs to answer to bug reports. See More

Top Con

Configuration is stored in a database

All configuration is stored in xfconf or dconf which is like the WIndows Registry very hard to edit with simple tools. 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 Con

Xfwm theming is limited

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

Top Con

No sound effect ...

Xfce does not support freedesktop sound themes. See More

Top Con

Has become a GNOME2/MATE clone

It has lost its way since 4.4 and is now just another GNOME2-like desktop. See More

Top Con

Openbox doesn't support Wayland

Top Con

Sessions cannot be disabled

There is a known bug where sessions keep getting saved involuntarily. So even when you try to clean your saved session it will be reproduced the next time you login. 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

Top Con

I think it doesn't support fn button for laptops - read comment!!

You can easily enable it, but it's not on out-of-the-box. - read comment!! See More

Top Con

Don't support fn button for laptop

Top Con

Still uses GTK2

However it looks like XFCE developers begun porting it to GTK3, but not many people wants to live on bleeding-edge system (may be too many bugs) or use beta/development versions of XFCE (it's hard to get these as far as I know). See More

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

score 23 · Answer 2

Cinnamon

Top Pro

Designed for traditional desktops

Top Con

Sometimes freezes

It can sometimes freeze which is really annoying. See More

Abd-El-Khalek SeliM's Experience

Was a great Experience with Linux Mint See More

Specs

Widget Toolkit:GTK+

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

Traditional desktop with the recent features

Top Con

Crashes

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

EmpatheticIlmatar's Experience

Simple and efficient. See More

Top Pro

Fast, elegant and stable interface

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

Top Con

Uses GTK

Nowadays, GTK is designed with GNOME, and only GNOME in mind. Non-GNOME applications which attempt to utilize it suffer as a result. See More

StudiousCirce's Experience

Using it on Linux Mint. See More

Top Pro

best for users coming from Windows

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

Top Con

Cumbersome main menu

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

Top Pro

Best for users coming from Windows

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

Top Con

Sound Settings not automatic

On Windows, for example, you can unplug a speaker and it will switch back to the laptop-speaker. In Cinnamon, you have to do it manually. 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 Con

Conservative design and UX choices

Tries to be too much like traditional Windows (XP, Vista, 7). 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

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

Nice themes and extensions

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

Top Con

Needs more choices for useful panel applets

Cinnamon still lacks some useful choices for panel applets compared to what other desktop environments offers. For example, Xfce is much better at managing panels and comes with a rich choice of useful panel applets. See More

Top Pro

Stable DE

Top Con

Conservative management without more creativity

It is almost the same management like in 20-years old GNOME 2 environment. Although some elements are new. See More

Top Pro

Very well supported

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

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

Your win+E, win+D etc are still working after migrating to Cinnamon from Windows See More

Top Pro

Actively developed with useful new features in each release

E.g vertical panels are now there. 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 Pro

Vertical panel already available

Top Pro

Works well with cairo dock on bottom and cinnamenu on top

Top Pro

You can easily get it to look like a Mac

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

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

score 45 · Answer 3

KDE Plasma

Top Pro

Looks beautiful

Top Con

HiDPI support is spotty

The log in screen as well as some other components of the OS do not scale properly under HIDPI. Everything in the log in screen will be displayed too small, as well as some areas of the OS. See More

Sidiculous's Experience

I've only tried Gnome and KDE, once I switched to KDE, I never felt the need to look for alternatives. Simple, compact and beautiful. See More

Specs

License:GPL, LGPL, MIT, X11, BSD

Programming Language:mostly C++

Widget Toolkit:Qt

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

TallRugiewit's Experience

I can configure it just enough to suit my needs. It is Polished, stable and secure-Opensuse Leap. It does everything I want well. I tried Cinnammon for quite a while it was fine. Yet I reverted back to KDE as I much prefer it. I am not certain that Opensuse is the best for me but have not distro-hopped a lot so I cannot say. 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 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

ResoluteKusarikku's Experience

for power users, it is best 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 Con

Buggy

CharmingCeto's Experience

Nice out of the box, cool effects, familiar to windows users (but nicer!) 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 Con

Need to customize a lot

ExceptionalUttu's Experience

I'm using this product for 5 years 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

InquisitiveGwynApNudd's Experience

My daily driver See More

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. 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

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

It's lightweight!

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

Every aspect of GNOME 3 has been crafted to fit together as a harmonious whole, so that it offers a consistent and integrated experience. See More

score 24 · Answer 4

Gnome 3

Top Pro

Clean UI

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

ElatedAtahensic's Experience

Easy to use and beautiful See More

Specs

Type:stacking

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 Pro

Simple and easy to use

Top Con

Extensions can break whole Gnome desktop

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

PioneeringEochaidMacEirc's Experience

Consistent interface that doesn't copy windows or OSX. See More

Top Pro

Highly stable

Gnome isn't obviously devoid of flaws, but it's pretty stable - especially in comparison with the KDE Plasma Desktop, which can literally fall apart after installing upgrades (and show a considerable number of error messages) or for whatever reasons - after turning on the computer you can end up without (Plasma) desktop altogether, which I believe IS quite unproductive. It is also noteworthy that many other major desktop environments are based on Gnome, and among these are: Cinnamon, Pantheon and (now dead) Unity. See More

Top Con

Depends too much on extensions to customize basic settings

TallRugiewit's Experience

It was too precribed and not configureable enough for me. Its rigidity was unappealling. Still a good desktop but not for me. See More

Top Pro

All the major players in the Linux ecosystem have finally collated on Gnome

Red Hat default = Gnome Fedora default = Gnome Debian default = Gnome Ubuntu default = Gnome Opensuse default = Gnome This doesn't mean the others go away, it just means there is a colossal community and industry backing behind Gnome. The point whether or not it being technically the best option is now off table and irrelevant. It is now the de facto standard. Like it or not. See More

Top Con

You can't put icons on the desktop

You have to enable the ability to add icons and files onto the desktop with Tweaks that you have to install. See More

Top Pro

Gnome-Tweak-Tool is 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

No support for fractional scaling

Unlike Qt, GTK has no support for it. 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

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 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

Made for touchscreens

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

Top Pro

Integrates with most Google Services

You can use your calendar, drive, contacts and most of Google services with Online Account option. You can show your Google Calendar events on the Gnome's default calendar app, Nautilus (Default file manager of GNOME) almost fully integrated with Google Drive and even you can read your PDF's with Evince (the default built-in PDF reader in GNOME). See More

Top Con

Full screen start menu

This may be fine if your screen is really small, but on a modern full HD 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

Original idea

It's not another desktop experience based on "windows experience". It's original. See More

Top Con

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

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

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

Great task manager

The GNOME Task Manager is great, showing all open processes with every needed detail. For each process you can see the amount of memory and processing power that it's using, along with the process priority. 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 Pro

Graphic apps 'feel smoother' on gnome than on KDE plasma

Graphics apps 'feel smoother' on gnome than on KDE plasma. Example: Gimp and inkscape, probably because they are developed in gtk+. See More

Top Con

Not truly tunable

Customization is very limited. See More

Top Pro

Hamburger Menus

If you use a Mouse you fell like a second class user. See More

Top Con

Slow

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

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

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 Pro

Great for minimalists

It may only do several things, but it's very good at each one of those things. You won't get lost in customization menus, and you certainly won't have an stability issues as long as your hardware is made within the last 10 years. See More

Top Con

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

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

Top Pro

Beautiful interface

Very very beautiful interface See More

Top Con

Every shell update breaks themes and extensions

Top Pro

Adheres to standards

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

Highly customisable

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

High resultion screens, multi monitor, content creation

If you depend on high resultion screens, multi monitor, or content creation programs you want Gnome. 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

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

Some GUI controls are much larger than on other desktops

This is wasting screen space on non-HiDPI monitors. 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

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

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

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

Great for high dpi displays

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

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 it's installing some packages or unpacking some archive to a themes folder and using selecting the new theme in e.g. gnome-tweak-tool. There are a lot of really good themes on DeviantArt. See More

Top Pro

Powerful search

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

Budgie is built from scratch to integrate with the Gnome stack, this way hopefully having more stability by utilizing technologies that have a lot of community work already behind them. See More

score 6 · Answer 5

Budgie

Top Pro

Built from scratch and integrates into current technolgies

Top Con

Still in development

Budgie is still young and in active development, so it may not be as stable as many other desktop environments. See More

Specs

License:mainly GPL

Available On:*nix (GNOME)

Top Pro

Modern design

Top Con

Issues with proprietary drivers and Mutter

Mutter causes issues with screen tearing and microstuttering in most applications especially with NVidia GPUs. See More

Top Pro

It's minimal and gorgeous

Top Con

Very hard to install

Installing in distros that are not ubuntu based can be hard. See More

Top Pro

Windows users will feel at home.

Top Con

Not a desktop environment

It's just a replacement for the GNOME-shell and you still need a GNOME-desktop installed at the same time. See More

Top Pro

No big memory leaks

It can be run for weeks with no noticeable increase in memory usage. That is a vast improvement over gnome-shell. See More

Top Con

Does not properly support multi monitor

Having two monitors works, but it's not perfect. See More

Top Pro

Very lightweight

Runs well on low-end hardware and gaming PC’s alike. See More

Top Con

Less lightweight than you would expect

Budgie has a nice and simple style, but the memory usage is quite high after booting. Thankfully, the lead developer is working to remedy this. See More

Top Con

Sometimes buggy

Budgie can sometimes be buggy. See More

LXDE is by far the most lightweight desktop environment, even topping XFCE. See More

score 7 · Answer 6

LXDE

Top Pro

The most lightweight desktop environment

Top Con

Development has slowed

LXDE is slowly reaching End of Life, but will still receive new updates as long as GTK +2 is in use. See More

Specs

LXDE is a simple desktop without a lot of bells and whistles, this allows it to remain lightweight which helps conserve battery power and maintain its speed of use. See More

Widget Toolkit:GTK+ 2

Top Pro

Energy saving and extremely fast

Top Con

Deprecated

Development has moved to LXQt. See More

Top Pro

Simple and straightforward menus

LXDE utilizes a XP like menu which is straightforward and familiar to many users. See More

Top Con

Doesn't look very well out of the box

But it is very customizable. See More

Top Con

No compositor

In order to keep the system light weight and CPU/GPU non intensive LXDE forgoes a compositing program, because of this there will be screen tearing. Though a compositor like Compton can be added for those that want it. See More

Top Con

Uses GTK

Nowadays, GTK is designed primarily for use with GNOME and with only GNOME in mind. Trying to do anything else with it results in needlessly hacky, unattractive programs. See More

Top Con

Openbox doesn't support Wayland

Top Con

Only halfway to GTK+3

Most of Xfce's components were built in GTK+2 and the upgrade process to GTK+3 was very slow due to the lack of manpower. See More

Top Con

Problem with log in

"The session is locked" message is a frequent problem when working with Lubuntu. See More

With a focus on being "light-weight", it is to KDE Plasma what XFCE is to GNOME: a familiar enough looking lighter alternative to the more fully featured environment that may work better on lower-end devices and for people who want as lean a system as possible. See More

score 8 · Answer 7

LXQT

Top Pro

Lightweight emphasis

Top Con

Unthemeable for usual users

As all Qt desktop environments themeing is hard since you need to know C++ , there is a sideway using qss however its not as powerful as GTK, Enlightenment or Windows theming. See More

Specs

License:LGPL, GPL

Widget Toolkit:Qt

LXQt is unparalleled in its ability to run on the weakest of machines without a problem. See More

Top Pro

Beautiful GUI using Qt

Top Con

Ugly

Top Pro

Great for old and low-end devices

Top Con

A lot of bugs

This is a very disappointing desktop environment, it's very buggy. Although there still is hope that these issues will be resolved. See More

Top Pro

Utilizes Qt

As the name suggests, LXQt takes advantage of the Qt ecosystem to provide a beautiful and performant user experience. See More

Top Con

Not quite ready for open deployment.

In the current state, LXQT is a beta desktop that feels like a heavy alpha. A lot of the tools and underlying features are in a testing state, while the LXQT project itself has not had a gold (1.0.0) release as of yet. See More

Top Pro

Modular

By taking advantage of the modular KDE Frameworks, LXQT is able to offer a modular architecture that allows the user to easily swap components. See More

Top Con

UHD screens hardly supported

DPI settings are not adopted. The readability, usability of this DE on UHD screens is not advisable. Fonts are not scaled at all. See More

Top Con

Missing Features = Lightweight

For the LXQT developers, lightweight is a synonym for missing features. See More

It has some of it's own programs which are quite beautiful. See More

score 21 · Answer 8

Deepin DE

Top Pro

Includes quality programs

Top Con

Not very customizable

Specs

License:Mostly GPL

Programming Language:Mostly C++

Widget Toolkit:Qt, Deepin Tool Kit

Top Pro

Easy to use

Deepin DE is very simple. See More

Top Con

Not installable on Ubuntu/Debian

At least, not easily, and not without potential problems. If you Want Deepin DE, use Deepin Linux, or grab Manjaro's DDE spin, or install manually on Arch Linux. Antergos, ArchLabs or similar. See More

Top Pro

Very beautiful

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

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

Stable

Top Pro

Touchscreen friendly

Top Pro

Uses Qt

Top Pro

Has a Windows-like and Mac-like interface

Easily switchable between the two, as well! See More

Top Pro

Quite lightweight

Deepin 15.7 has been optimized and now uses less than half the system resources of prior editions. 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 succeeds where Gnome 3 failed. See More

Great for laptops. See More

score 5 · Answer 9

Enlightenment

Top Pro

Fast and good with battery life

Top Con

Non-tiling

Overlaps and spaces between windows are both pointless. See More

Specs

License:BSD

Widget Toolkit:Elementary

There's a ton of settings stacked into a quite compact settings menu that is easy to navigate. See More

Top Pro

Highly customizable, easy customization

Top Con

Minimal set of utilities

Enlightenment only comes with the bare essentials, meaning there is little that can be done upon first install in comparison to other more fully featured desktops. This does, however, leave all the customization of what apps to install up to the user, which may be a plus to some and is directly comparable to most other bare bones Window managers. See More

Top Pro

Lightning fast

Startup of e is lightning fast -- as it is during working with the WM. See More

Top Con

Sub-menu does not change direction when out of space

When you right-click for the menu in the right part of the screen but there is insufficient space for the cascading menu, you have to interrupt your selecting and move your pointer to touch the right edge of your screen - this manually moves the menu over to the left a little bit, so it has space. If there is a sub-menu, you have to once again move your pointer to the extreme right edge of the screen, for it to move over - and so on, for each level of sub-menu. Every other OS and app/program in the world today, simply changes direction to where the sub-menus cascade. Whether that be upwards because it's too close to the bottom (we see this in the selection menus in our browsers in forms, or to change sides as we are accustomed to in all programs). This is logical, universal, expected behavior. But not in e17. See More

Top Pro

Unique workspace set ups

You could have a screen cluttered with panels and another with none.. A feature that is easy with enlightenment. See More

Top Con

Ugly default theme

The default theme is rather ugly so it's necessary to apply a new theme as soon as you install Enlightenment. See More

Top Pro

Beautiful interface

Enlightenment offers a beautiful interface with eye candy: it can be themed easily to the user's liking and includes an optional compositor. See More

Top Pro

Quick mouse-driven menus

Enlightenments menu is easily and quickly accessible by left-clicking anywhere on the desktop. See More

Top Pro

No programming experience required to configure the environment

Configuring the environment of Enlightenment is done through a UI, so no prior knowledge of coding languages or editing of config files is needed. See More

Top Pro

Lots of themes available

There is a large selection of themes available for the Enlightenment window manager, meaning that customization to one's preference is very straight-forward. See More

Top Pro

Virtual desktop previews

Enlightenment allows for virtual desktop previews within its desktop widget for switching desktops within its thumbnails. See More

Top Pro

Havn't found a WM that beats e16 in 20 years.

I've been using e16 for about 20 years and tried quite some other WMs, but always returned back to e16. It's fast, doesn't use much resources, is highly customizable and is rock solid (I cannot remember it crashing). It's combination of simplicity and beauty is unmatched. The default theme on e16 is kinda disappointing. Try B-42 or Dark-One. Be careful if you enable Composite. It works flawless, but you can screw your menus when playing around with the transparent settings in the settings menu. Making a backup-copy of your .e16 preferences beforehand might save you some trouble. See More

Because it's older codebase is based on Gnome 2 which was the champion for desktop environments for a long time, it's very stable and has plenty of features which work perfectly for old machines. See More

score 12 · Answer 10

MATE

Top Con

Unfriendly and hostile developers

Top Pro

Works great on old machines

Specs

Widget Toolkit:GTK+

Since it's basically a fork of Gnome 2, and it's created to satisfy Gnome 'purists' it's very unlikely for it to add new features more in line with modern DEs. See More

Top Con

Not very likely to have new features

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 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 you 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

Full HiDPI support

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

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

Perfect balance between simplicity and complexity

All the rest desktop environment had some irritating trait which could make it switch on to another DE. It's all about the smallest details and features, which are long to write about, but eventually all those details make an impression of the most convenient Linux DE. See More

Top Con

Requires XML for wallpaper slideshow

As described on Gnome 3, Mate being a fork of even older GNOME technologies requires for (some unfathomable reason) to create a curated XML file for a desktop slideshow, instead of the more logical and modern systems used by other DEs, which consists of simply pointing at a folder and the DE figures the rest out. See More

Top Pro

Follows the GNOME2 HIG

https://developer.gnome.org/hig-book/3.12/index.html.en See More

Top Con

Dated look and feel

Outdated aesthetic. See More

Top Pro

Does not need a composite manager

You can use it without GPU hardware acceleration. See More

Top Con

MATE lacks customized desktop icon placement on multiple monitors

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

Top Pro

Full and fast...

Scales better, full compliment themed applets, easily customization. App/Place/Sys menu and other menus, Mint version set at bottom for new Linux users. OPTION for panel background or follows system(with "controls") for theme matching. See More

Top Con

Issues with changing users permissions and access

Top Pro

MATE is a serviceable choice

MATE is a solid serviceable choice for a DE. It is reliable and easy to customize. However, it lacks the icon placement in multiple monitors found in Cinnamon, KDE, or Windows. See More

Top Con

Requires XML for wallpaper slideshow.

As described on Gnome 3, Mate being a fork of even older GNOME technologies requires for (some unfathomable reason) to create a curated XML file for a desktop slideshow, instead of the more logical and modern systems used by other DEs, which consists of simply pointing at a folder and the DE figures the rest out. See More

Top Pro

Multiple panels work great across multiple displays

This is very simple, but it is something much appreciate: the panel's window list is per display. So if you move a window over your second display, it gets transferred to the window list on the second display's panel. Multiple display support works very intuitively, right out of the box, with minimal tweaking. 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

Has menu icons

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

Top Pro

Extremely customizable

MATE is customizable from every aspect. And very much stable compared to another Desktop environment. 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

Has window borders

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

Top Pro

Very stable

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

Top Pro

Distraction-free environment

Default Desktop Environment:GNOME / KDE Plasma / XFCE / Cinnamon / LXDE / LXQT / MATE /Sugar

score 2 · Answer 11

Fedora Cinnamon

Based On:Red Hat Enterprise Linux

score 3 · Answer 12

TDE (Trinity)

Top Pro

Highly performant and efficient

outperforms other "lightweight" DEs like XFCE, LXDE, and many Openbox setups. Still delivers a full-featured & modern desktop experience if you want it to. Runs on even the oldest machines. See More

Top Con

Missing many modern features

JayJay The Fifth's Experience

Has all the features missing in so called "light weight" DEs and still uses less system ressources than them. Outperforms even Openbox, XFCE, LXDE and others. Very fast and efficient. Without all the bloat from Qt4 or 5. Highly modular - Can be installed as a WM only, without other KDE3-components (minimal installation). Very stable and fully featured desktop experience that runs even on the oldest PCs. Good compatibility to modern Qt4+ and GTK 3+ Apps. Still gets updates and fixes from TDE and OpenSUSE (KDE3/qt3 team and mailinglist). No security bugs found for a long time. See More

Specs

Programming Language:C/C++

Widget Toolkit:TQt3

Available on:*nix, BSD

Top Pro

Highly configurable

Trinity is every customizable, almost every aspect of the GUI can be changed to look like you want. Need a button in the toolbar? You can add it. You want a specialized toolbar in a certain part of the screen? You can add it. You can configure the GUI in the setup before the first run too. See More

Top Con

Slow development

Two years from one patch release to another and instead of fixing bugs it adds new ones. See More

ToughAsteria's Experience

lightweight, fast, modular and full-featured. this DE/WM just has it all. Try out Q4OS-TDE Live CD to see its features and most popular themes. Feels like modern KDE without the fluff or bloat of modern DEs. Can be installed and used as simple WM like Openbox. See More

Top Pro

Low resource usage

Top Con

Looks old

The desktop and everything looks outdated and very similar to Windows 2000. See More

Top Pro

Works fine on old computers

It is very responsive in 7+ years old computers See More

Top Con

Huge and obsolete codebase

Trinity is based in Qt 3, which is unmaintained by upstream. The KDE 3 codebase is also unmaintained. As new technologies like Systemd become a new standard the lack of developers make Trinity more incompatible and error/bug/security risk prone. See More

Top Pro

Many themes by default. Looks the way you want

including themes that look like Windows 95-XP, Vista, and 7 (see Q4OS themes) See More

Top Pro

Traditional desktop experience

As a fork of KDE 3.5 Trinity is designed for Unix-like operating systems, intended for computer users preferring a traditional desktop model. See More

Top Pro

Stable system that does not change everything every 6 months just for the sake of it

Top Pro

HIghly modular. Minimal installation and WM-only installation possible

Use it as a pure WM if you want. Like Openbox or IceWM. No need to install other KDE3-components. See More

Top Pro

Many themes by default

including themes that look like Windows 95 and Windows XP See More

Select the window. Hold ALT+SHIFT and press SPACE until the window takes up the entire screen. See More

score 1 · Answer 13

awesome

Top Pro

Any window can be full screen

Specs

License:GPL 2.0

Programming Language:C / Lua

Type:Tiling / Dynamic

Initial Release:September 18, 2007

The user can have each window visible on one, multiple, or no workspace. You can also temporarily include another workspace in the current one. See More

Top Pro

Single window, multi-workspace support

Top Pro

Stable

Awesome always works as it should: it is very stable and reliable. See More

Top Pro

Tags instead of workspaces

With awesome, clients are organized with tags: one client can be on more than one tag, and multiple tags can be displayed at the same time. See More

Top Pro

Good default configuration

By default, you'll have a status bar (hidden in some modes), an application launcher, automatic fullscreen, manual fullscreen shortcut, etc. See More

Top Pro

Some mouse tiling support

You can rearrange and re-size [some] panels via the mouse. See More

Top Pro

Keyboard friendly

Awesome is really keyboard friendly and you can do almost anything with keyboard shortcuts. See More

Top Pro

Fully extensible with Lua

Awesome can be skinned, configured, and extended with Lua, a language with a programming model similar to the ubiquitous Javascript. Learning resources for Lua are fairly abundant, as Lua is a popular extension language, often used for scripting in games. See More

Top Pro

Low latency

Awesome was the first window manager to be ported to use the asynchronous XCB library instead of XLib, making it much more responsive than most other window managers. See More

Top Pro

Highly configurable

Awesome is highly configurable, allowing the user to change anything they see fit in order to make the WM work for them and their workflow. See More

Top Pro

Easy module for useless gaps

Lain module makes useless gaps easy. See More

score 1 · Answer 14

UKUI

Top Pro

Stylish

Specs

It's more like Windows 8 but besides that, it looks great. See More

Price:Free

Top Pro

Nice feel

score 3 · Answer 15

Liri Desktop

Widget Toolkit:QT

Type:stacking

Answer 16

Lumina

Widget Toolkit:Qt

To enable things like the minimize button, status bar indicators, and what some might call "normal" desktop features, you need to tweak the system to make it usable. See More

score 2 · Answer 17

Pantheon

Top Con

Requires tweaks to be usable

Top Pro

Smooth, subtle animations

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

Specs

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

Languages:Vala

Top Con

Slow maintenance

Top Pro

Simple, clean aesthetic

Nonintrusive and easy to overview workspace. See More

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

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

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

Answer 18

Equinox