Introducing
The Slant team built an AI & it’s awesome
Find the best product instantly
Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to Safari
Try it now
4.7 star rating
0
Linux
Desktop Environment
Unix
Unix-like
What are the best UNIX-like desktop environments for non-developers?
6
Options
Considered
26
User
Recs.
Jan 15, 2024
Last
Updated
Related Questions
Activity
Have feedback or ideas?
Join our community
on Discord
Ad
6
Options
Considered
Best UNIX-like desktop environments for non-developers
Price
License
Programming Language
--
KDE
-
-
-
--
Cinnamon
-
GPL
mostly C
--
Deepin DE
-
Mostly GPL
Mostly C++
--
MATE
-
GPL
mostly C
--
GNOME
Free
GPL
mostly C
See Full List
--
KDE
My Rec
ommendation
for
KDE
My Recommendation for
KDE
All
13
Pros
7
Cons
6
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
•••
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
Top
Pro
•••
Active development
See More
Top
Con
•••
Interfaces are inconsistent and ugly in 4.x
While parts of KDE in 4.x can be very good looking, a common opinion is that the style is too hobbled together with inconsistent icons and styles clashing with each other.
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
•••
Poorly named app menu with too many apps starting with "K"
This is better in KDE Neon with minimalist apps, which indeed in itself points out the problem.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Highly customisable
There are many customization options and possibilities to tweak the desktop, including widgets.
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
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
•••
KDE is awesome but it is overcomplicated for newbies for sure
Way too many options for newbies to digest before the learning curve is over.
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
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
Top
Pro
•••
Open source
See More
Hide
See All
Get it
here
Recommend
9
1
--
Cinnamon
My Rec
ommendation
for
Cinnamon
My Recommendation for
Cinnamon
All
15
Pros
9
Cons
5
Specs
Top
Pro
•••
Designed for traditional desktops
Intended for large-screen, non-touch devices that extend traditional concepts with functionality and good looking aesthetic.
See More
Top
Con
•••
Many custom GTK widgets
For example, it uses custom widgets like: XAppStackSidebar instead of GtkStackSidebar which makes breaks many GTK themes unusable.
See More
Specs
License:
GPL
Programming Language:
mostly C
Widget Toolkit:
GTK+
Available on:
*nix
See All Specs
Top
Pro
•••
Fast, elegant and stable interface
Cinnamon uses a traditional desktop userflow that most computer users are familiar with.
See More
Top
Con
•••
No traditional menu available
The only menus you'll get are big fat XP-like menus where you need to scroll with a scrollbar - any X11 window manager has a better menu available than Cinnamon.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Actively developed with useful new features in each release
E.g vertical panels are now there.
See More
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
•••
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
•••
Cumbersome main menu
Main menu takes a lot of space and is cumbersome to navigate.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Very well supported
Has a great community and is very well supported through Linux Mint website.
See More
Top
Con
•••
Sometimes freezes
It can sometimes freeze which is really annoying.
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
•••
Stable DE
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
•••
Update Manager is the best
See More
Hide
See All
Get it
here
Recommend
4
1
--
Deepin DE
My Rec
ommendation
for
Deepin DE
My Recommendation for
Deepin DE
All
16
Pros
10
Cons
5
Specs
Top
Con
•••
Goes contrary to the concept of customizability
If you want non-configurability, go back to Windows or Mac. This is a step back for Linux.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Option to turn off mouse acceleration in the settings
See More
Specs
License:
Mostly GPL
Programming Language:
Mostly C++
Widget Toolkit:
Qt, Deepin Tool Kit
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
•••
Touchscreen friendly
See More
Top
Con
•••
Not very customizable
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
Con
•••
Poor translations
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
Con
•••
Buggy
Many features do not immediately work.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Has a Windows-like and Mac-like interface
Easily switchable between the two, as well!
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Includes quality programs
It has some of it's own programs which are quite beautiful.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Stable
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Easy to use
Deepin DE is very simple.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Very beautiful
Deepin DE has some blur designs which make it very beautiful.
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
Hide
See All
Get it
here
Recommend
2
2
--
MATE
My Rec
ommendation
for
MATE
My Recommendation for
MATE
All
8
Pros
6
Cons
1
Specs
Top
Pro
•••
Extremely customizable
MATE is customizable from every aspect. And very much stable compared to another Desktop environment.
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
Specs
License:
GPL
Programming Language:
mostly C
Widget Toolkit:
GTK+
Available on:
*nix
Top
Pro
•••
Many new features
The MATE team added plenty of power user features that were previously rejected by the GNOME team.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Pays its developpers
Thanks to the Patreon page, money is collected to pay for the developers maintaining and adding new features to MATE.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Has menu icons
MATE has icons in every popup menu, which makes navigating through them very fast.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Has window borders
Other than GNOME, MATE has not introduced OSX-alike Client Side decorations.
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
Hide
See All
Get it
here
Recommend
2
--
GNOME
My Rec
ommendation
for
GNOME
My Recommendation for
GNOME
All
6
Cons
5
Specs
Top
Con
•••
Standardized
The desktop layout is not as modifiable as some other options, and certain settings require additional software (such as Gnome Tweak Tool) to reasonably modify.
See More
Specs
License:
GPL
Programming Language:
mostly C
Widget Toolkit:
GTK+
Available on:
*nix
See All Specs
Top
Con
•••
Designed for tablets before desktops
Said a million times already by the other cons but the design is for tablets, even though the primary usecase is on laptops.
See More
Top
Con
•••
Hides many settings
GNOME sometimes reduces the whole interface to the absolute minimum, a few examples: GNOME hides many advanced options/settings in its interfaces Toolbars can't be edited without external tools Menubars have been removed in favor of a hamburger menu Newer GTK versions remove icons inside popupmenus and menu mnemonics
See More
Top
Con
•••
No tray support by default
An extension has to be installed to get tray support.
See More
Top
Con
•••
Unstable
Every extension can break the desktop.
See More
Hide
See All
Free
Recommend
1
2
--
Pantheon
My Rec
ommendation
for
Pantheon
My Recommendation for
Pantheon
All
10
Cons
9
Specs
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. Pantheon is no exception.
See More
Specs
License:
GPL
Programming Language:
C
Widget Toolkit:
GTK
Languages:
Vala
Top
Con
•••
Buggy
See More
Top
Con
•••
Looks and feels like a Mac
Which may turn quite a few people off with the aesthetics, of course for some people, this is a pro.
See More
Top
Con
•••
No icons on desktop
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
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
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
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
Con
•••
Not available for major Linux distributions
See More
Hide
See All
Get it
here
Recommend
2
Don't see your favorite option? Add it.
Built By the Slant team
Find the best product instantly.
4.7 star rating
Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to Safari
Try it now - it's free
One sec!
Are you sure that you want to abandon your hard work?
Delete Work
Continue working
{}
undefined
url next
price drop