What are the best Linux desktop environments for developers?

Widget Toolkit:GTK+

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

Top Pro

Fast, elegant and stable interface

Top Con

Needs more choices for useful panel applets

Cinnamon still lacks some useful choices for panel applets. For excellent management of panels and a rich choice of useful panel applets, I rely on Xfce. See More

RealisticCeto's Experience

Cinnamon does not force things on me like Gnome does. I can make Cinnamon look and work like I work. I don't have to constantly work around the GUI. See More

Top Pro

Very customizable

From little things like folder colors to larger options like desklets. Unlike gnome and unity, there is an option for almost any desktop preference. See More

Top Con

Sometimes freezes

It can sometimes freeze which is really annoying. See More

Top Pro

Simple and complete therefore good for ex-Windows users

Cinnamon is one of the simplest of the Linux desktops to use. Everything appears to be at hand, and this is one of the easiest of the Linux desktop environments to get familiar with. It is, as has been pointed out, very customisable. The Mint install with Cinnamon seems to provide just about everything a user would want on their desktop system and it's easy to get at (mostly). But, like anything Linux, if you want to do STUFF likely you will be at the command prompt (or terminal if you prefer). See More

Top Con

Conservative design and UX choices

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

Top Pro

Easy to relaunch if a crash occurs

No need to restart the computer. Just relaunch if there is a crash. 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

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

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

Stable DE

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

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

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 Con

Looks dull

Top Pro

Vertical panel already available

Top Pro

You can easily get it to look like a Mac

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

Works well with cairo dock on bottom and cinnamenu on top

Top Pro

best for users coming from Windows

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

Top Pro

Pretty design

Top Pro

Actively developed with useful new features in each release

E.g. vertical panels are now there. See More

Top Pro

Very well supported

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

Top Pro

Lots of configuration options

Both Gnome and Cinnamon got the same looking configuration panel. There are 40 sub-panels in Linux Mint Cinnamon's, whenever there a far less with Ubuntu Gnome 3's. Windows, notification, smart corners, windows overlay, connexion windows... you can have those in Gnome, but these require compiz and other stuff. See More

Top Pro

Very easy to customize

Is 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 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

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

Update Manager is the best

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

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

Deepin DE

Top Pro

Very beautiful

Top Con

Not very customizable

PassionateRaediengiedte's Experience

After using Deepin DE on my PC and dual monitor setup, since the release of Fedora 30, I would like to say that it was somewhat stable. No crashes, but sometimes it can get slow. I have 8GB of RAM on my desktop and I prefer the file manager from Deepin instead of Gnome. On my laptop i have Fedora 30 but only use Gnome and sometimes I miss the easy interface of Deepin DE. I get the job done no matter if I'm on Deepin DE or on Gnome, but I tend to use more Deepin DE. I would prefer if the bar/dock would be present more customization options. The default clock icon is not pretty or easy to read, and would prefer to be able to arrange where I want to have the application menu positioned, the "system tray" or the trash icon. Overall I do quite enjoy it, love the terminal, file manager and the control panel that slides. See More

Specs

License:Mostly GPL

Programming Language:Mostly C++

Widget Toolkit:Qt, Deepin Tool Kit

Top Pro

Quite lightweight

Top Con

Bad/lacking documentation

Top Pro

Has a Windows-like and Mac-like interface

Easily switchable between the two, as well! See More

Top Con

Looks like in an early development stage

It somehow looks incomplete, a couple of normal command line options, e.g. to reveal a file, are not available. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use

Deepin DE is very simple. See More

Top Con

Not the most customizable DE in the world

Top Pro

Supports a number of Linux distributions

It currently supports the following Linux distros: Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Manjaro, Antergos, Gentoo, Sparky Linux, Puppy Linux, Pardus and openSUSE. See More

Top Pro

Stable

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

Includes quality programs

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

Top Pro

Touchscreen friendly

Top Pro

Option to turn off mouse acceleration in the settings

Top Pro

Simplicity within applications

The terminal and the file manager are amazing. See More

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

LXQT

Top Pro

Utilizes Qt

Top Con

Poor file manager

pcmanfm-qt is lightyears behind its GTK version. See More

Specs

License:LGPL, GPL

Programming Language:C++

Widget Toolkit:Qt

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

Top Pro

Lightweight emphasis

Top Con

Multiple application sources

Which leads to an inconsistent desktop. 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

Pcmanfm-qt needs gvfs

you can mount drives with mount, but pcmanfm uses gnomes gvfs to mount drives. See More

Top Pro

Beautiful GUI using KDE's Qt so it looks familiar

Top Con

Very limited in customization

Very few themes available, especially modern themes. See More

Top Pro

Customizable

It comes with convenient plugins for the panel. It can also be customized to fit any workflow by editing openbox's (its window manager) text-based configuration file. See More

Top Con

Depends too much on KDE

Even the programs/apps shipped with LXQt are from the KDE project. They don't have their own projects yet. It's pretty similar to Budgie that depends on Gnome for almost everything. See More

Top Pro

Great for old and low-end devices

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

Top Con

Not a full desktop environment

Like LXDE or Xfce it is not a full desktop envirnment and is missing many utilities that need to be borrowed from other desktops which will bloat the desktop. 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 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 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

Top Con

Ugly

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

Solid as a rock linux desktop, just works. See More

MATE

Top Pro

Extremely stable

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

Widget Toolkit:GTK+

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

Traditional desktop experience

Top Con

Not very likely to have new features

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. But It doesn't mean that it doesn't/won't support modern apps. See More

Top Pro

Works great on old machines

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

Top Con

Unfriendly and hostile developers

Top Pro

Suitable for both new and mature users

Easy to use for new users, Easy to tune for mature users. 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

Highly customizable

It can emulate the looks of Windows, macOS, openSUSE, Unity etc. which makes shift from one OS to another seamless. 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

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

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

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

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

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

Has window borders

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

Full HiDPI support

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

Top Pro

Works smoothly with Compiz

Top Pro

Does not need a composite manager

You can use it without GPU hardware acceleration. 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

Works on single board computers

Run well on single board computers such as Raspberry Pi, O-DROID, etc. See More

Top Pro

Distraction-free environment

Top Pro

Extremely fast over remote terminal solutions such as X2Go and noVNC

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

KDE Plasma Desktop

Top Pro

Highly flexible

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

ConvivialKastytis's Experience

"Simple by default, powerful when needed" is really true for Plasma these last few years. The team lately focuses even on the small usability issues which makes this DE a joy to use. Stability has improved a lot since the early KDE4 days. The biggest plus is still imho the great suite of default KDE Apps, I especially love Dolphin, Gwenview, and Okular. See More

Specs

License:GPL, LGPL

Programming Language:Mainly C++

Widget Toolkit:Qt

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

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

Top Con

Bad integration of remote filesystems

Editing files in Kate, which were opened from remote SFTP (or other) connections in Dolphin does not allow seamlessly saving the file back to the remote connection without completely closing the file. That precludes easy iterative changes to remote files. See More

ArtisticIstustaya's Experience

Excellent integration between application through DBUS and easy to script automations with any language, including shell & python. 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 Con

Fattest, most bloated, and uninspired DE around

Much like Gnome has become. See More

Rajshekhar AP's Experience

Mostly Java, Python development. Session restore is really handy. 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 Con

HiDPI support is spotty

The log in screen as well as some other components of the OS do not scale properly under HIDPI. Some things in the log in screen will be displayed too small, such as the mouse pointer. It can also be difficult to get full scaling to work properly in the DE itself with things such as icons, text and window borders. 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

Difficult to use on virtual machines on version 5

KWin compositing is restricted to xrender on virtual machines which makes the default booting process difficult as 3D graphics needs to be turned off from the VM itself. See More

Top Pro

Many coherent applications

What make plasma so nice is the galaxy of apps, sharing same look and feel, configuration and behaviour. This helps with making for a uniform looking desktop. See More

Top Con

Swollen look out of the box

In default theme elements are extremely large, which makes screen feel smaller than it really is. Some of the things are not easy to fix - even compact main menu still has awful huge paddings and header font size in calendar is ugly. 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

Add-on installation can be tricky

Adding themes and widgets can be tricky. 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

Limited in themes, especially the most modern ones

Most of the themes are created for the GTK world, it means GNOME. KDE Plasma is very limited when compared to the whole quantity of GTK2 and GTK3 themes available. See More

Top Pro

Superb Virtual Workspace management

Full desktop grids of arbitrary dimensions as well as "Activity" overlays make it easy to organize space efficiently regardless of actual screen real estate available. See More

Top Con

Certain releases are frighteningly unstable

Top Pro

Enjoyable to use

Thanks to looking awesome, and being customizable and flexible. See More

Top Con

Weird behaviour of PowerOff/Restart/LogOff buttons

No matter what button you press you get the same screen where you actually have to choose what you want to do 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

Some applications warn when running as root

This can be distracting to the user. See More

Top Pro

Highly customizable

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

Top Con

Drains your battery

There is a lot of stuff on KDE the will drain your battery more quickly than on other desktops. For example, it uses many SVGs which have to be rendered before display, kwin also needs a working compositor. See More

Top Pro

Integration with mobile devices

KDE Connect allows integration of the computer and mobile devices on the same Wi-Fi network. See More

Top Con

Lost its way

On KDE3 you could fully customize every KDE application eg: you could move toolbars to all corners, add toolbar entries and all applications followed one interface guidline by having menubars, toolbars, statusbars etc. However since KDE4 some applications like Dolphin miss those features and it goes even further with the newer QML based applications. See More

Top Pro

Composite features

Like Magnifier, Mouse Highlighting on Click, and many other. See More

Top Con

Poor support of 4K screens

Even scaling doesn't help. Many places keep small font or icons See More

Top Pro

Low system resources consumption

Not as lightweight as XFCE, but pretty close (like +100MB in real use). See More

Top Con

Hard to customize

For example to create a Qt theme you need to learn Qt and C++. To create a plasma theme you have to use SVGs that follow a strict standard. For creating login themes you need to know QML. See More

Top Pro

Great for developers

Provides its own IDE for C++, Qt, HTML and through workspaces allows better organisation of work. See More

Top Con

Too complex

Shows too many options at once often time, making it more complex than simplistic. See More

Top Pro

Fast and efficient

Looks great! Dolphin file manager is without a doubt the best fully functional and easy to use and multitask with. See More

Top Con

Perceived clunkyness and slowness

Emphasis on perceived. It's a myth from the days when SSDs, gigabytes of ram and cpus above 1GHz and more than one core were a fantasy. On anything semi modern (i5 2500k, 8 gb memory and 256 gb ssd is total overkill and that's a 5 year old system) it's as fast as anything. See More

Top Pro

Not based on GTK

A lot of users don't really like GTK's style and way of doing things. See More

Top Con

Apps can't be run as root

It is not a security feature, it is a limitation. See More

Top Pro

Very customizable

One of the best aspects of KDE is that it gives you Lego-like tools called widgets. You can combine the widgets in the way that better fits you and get a Mac OS desktop layout, a Gnome 3 desktop layout, a mobile device desktop layout or a completely new desktop layout that works for you. See More

Top Con

Sound output problem

You need to go in sound settings to switch between speakers and HDMI display sound. You can't switch easily just from sound widget located in task bar. See More

Top Pro

Familiar interface for transitioning Windows users

Top Con

Sometimes taskbar doesn't appear

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 Con

Add-on installation can be tricky

Adding themes and widgets can be tricky. See More

Top Pro

Activities what multiple desktops needed

You can really separate work ambient from personal ambient. See More

Top Con

No native package manager frontend

KDE discontinued all of its native package manager frontends like: Kynaptic, Muon or Kpackage and fully relies on PackageKit, however, PackageKit was mainly made with the RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) in mind and does not support all the features of more advanced package managers like dpkg or emerge/portage. See More

Top Pro

Simple by default, powerful when needed

For the new Linux users (coming from Windows), they'll find everything easy and simple to use. But for old and experienced Linux users, they can customize the interface as they want. See More

Top Con

Shell-style ≠ widget-style

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

Top Pro

Separate LTS version

KDE has an LTS version for people expecting stability. See More

Top Con

Breeze theme is ugly

Breeze theme gives some wow effect at first with all its transparencies etc. But when you get used, you start to notice lackluster icons and oversimplified look of ui elements - there is just nothing to look at and it looks lazy. See More

Top Pro

Innovative

Has a lot of good features preinstalled (Android integration with KDEConnect, etc.), and comes with lots of improvements and new features with new releases. See More

Top Con

Compiz integration destroyed

The KDE developers seem to pride themselves on destroying previously working features with each release. Plasma 5 is terrible because Activities and Virtual Desktops are completely separate now. VD's in Plasma 5 can't even have separate wallpapers let alone widgets. Activities don't integrate with Compiz and KDE well at all (no cube, different keyboard commands). Using Activities and Virtual Desktops together gets confusing real fast. Combined with the fact the developers have no interest in fixing this at all KDE users are just running away to new desktops that are borrowing old perfectly good KDE code. See More

Top Pro

Easy-to-use software center

Apt, snap, and packagekit all show up in the built in software center. Updates show as an icon in the system tray from all sources. See More

Top Con

Eats a lot of resources

Running it in a virtual machine (2GB RAM, 2 processors) is significantly slower than other desktops. See More

Top Pro

Activities (evolution of multiple desktops)

You can really separate your work environment from personal environment. Applications can be 'pinned' to a single Activity (spreadsheet for work, game for personal) or shown on all Activities (web browser, for instance). See More

Top Con

Interfaces are inconsistent and ugly

While parts of KDE 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

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 Con

Not for production

May be extremely buggy and there are unnecesary configurations which takes away time to do actual work. See More

Top Pro

Simple by default, powerful when needed!

For the new Linux users (coming from windows), they'll find everything easy and simple to use! But for old and experienced linux users, they can customize the interface as they want! That's why Plasma KDE, Simple by default, powerful when needed! See More

Top Con

Issues with printing

Qt5 apps are unable to access all advanced printing options, which is a huge drawback because you will have to install GTK apps to get full printing functions. See More

Top Pro

Touchscreen support

Works good with touch devices and allows customization of gestures for them. See More

Top Con

Kirigami is buggy

The newer QML based interface is too much tied to the breeze style. So if you use another style(like Qt's default Fusion) you will have a mixed desktop interface of fusion and breeze. It also fails at certain points to set the correct color in a widget so if you use a dark theme you will often face dark text on dark background issues. See More

Top Pro

Nice mouse-context features with KIM

Top Con

No easy way to backup & restore all settings

Most crashes cause loss of settings - panels vanish, all favorites and launchers missing, icons lost, wallpaper back to default, theme changes, activities present but not active, etc. The configuration is held in a multitude of places, the changes are applied automatically even after a crash, all without a tool or clear way to recover. See More

Top Con

Held back by dedication to emulating Windows

One of KDE's pros is that it works similarly to 90's-era desktop environments such as Windows. However this holds it back from being able to present something that works intuitively for people who aren't familiar with how computers back in the 90's worked. See More

Top Con

Difficult to turn off some transparency

Some of the transparency settings for Plasma can only be removed by changing away from the standard theme altogether. A bit disappointing as so many other things are configurable to the deepest detail and transparency in the wrong place can make reading menu entries for example difficult at times. See More

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

LXDE

Top Pro

Energy saving and extremely fast

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. LXQT could be a natural alternative. See More

Specs

Ideal for older hardware,fast execution,conservative look. See More

Programming Language:C

Widget Toolkit:GTK+ 2

Top Pro

Crazy light resource management

Top Con

Doesn't look very well out of the box

But it is very customizable. See More

Top Pro

Extremely lightweight

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

Top Con

Problem with log in

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

Top Pro

Nicely balanced between speed, stability and features

Top Con

Openbox doesn't support Wayland

Top Pro

Simple and straightforward menus

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

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 Pro

You can setup LXDE with the same look across different machines easily

Most of the configuration of LXDE is read from files. Consequently, you can store and manage these files in the same way you might manage other dotfiles, meaning that you can setup LXDE to your liking on a new machine very quickly and easily. See More

Top Con

Deprecated

Development has moved to LXQt. See More

Top Pro

Designed for cloud networks

LXDE works well on lower end devices such as cloud computers or netbooks. it is able to do this because of its low CPU and RAM requirements. 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

GNOME 3 has been designed to make it simple and easy to use. See More

Gnome 3

Top Pro

Simple and easy to use

Top Con

Poor stability when running for several days

Every application seems to take its toll on gnome-shell. After several days, it will use a lot of memory and become unstable. It might crash itself. Or it might get so slow that it must be restarted to be usable. It seems that applications using JavaScript accelerate this process. See More

Specs

Programming Language:C

Widget Toolkit:GTK

Type:stacking

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 Pro

Keyboard friendly

Top Con

Some areas are unpolished and lack features

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 Pro

Clean UI

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

Top Con

No customization

You can't move the menu to another direction. To modify anything beyond the wallpaper requires third-party software. See More

Top Pro

Powerful search

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

Top Con

Heavy on RAM

It is the DE that needs the largest amount of RAM. 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 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

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

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

Some GUI controls are much larger than on other desktops

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

Top Pro

Minimal and productive UI

Minimal and sleek UI makes for a fast and snappy experience, making the GNOME desktop very productive. 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

Adheres to standards

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

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

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

Poor 'drag and drop into application' capability

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

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

Performance Problems have been fixed

The reason for most down vote fixed. Anything left is opinion now and most can be adjusted via extension. 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

Beautiful interface

Very very beautiful interface. See More

Top Con

Depends too much on extensions to customize basic settings

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

No support for fractional scaling

Unlike Qt, GTK has no support for it. 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

Slow

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

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

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

Becomes fat, bloated and slow like KDE

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

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

Top Pro

Extensible

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

Ubuntu default DE

Top Con

Hefty (lots of dependencies)

Gnome 3 in the current state is heavily weighed down by having a lot of functions as requirements, rather than options. You MUST have their email client, calendar, and more installed as the environment relies on them directly for basic functionality. Which is absurd as most other DEs don't require a specific calendar program just to tell you what day it is. 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

Flashback mode offers a classic look

For people looking for older, more classic looks, Flashback mode offers just that. Ubuntu users can have this option by installing a package called "gnome-session-flashback." See More

Top Con

Memory leakage

Some OSs with Gnome3 have this problem. 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 Pro

Gnome-Tweak-Tool is Awesome/ Connects w Firefox/Chrome

So many awesome options now 2 clicks away, sorted easily by user/downloads/rating/etc. 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 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

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

Budgie

Top Pro

User-friendly

Top Con

Less lightweight than you would expect

Specs

License:mainly GPL

Available On:*nix (GNOME)

Widget Toolkit:GTK

Top Pro

Very stable

It continues running smoothly over extended periods of time. Applications that used to crash in GNOME Shell(Skype for Linux, Wire, Firefox) give absolutely no problems here. See More

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

Top Pro

Lightweight

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

Top Con

Lacks some basic features

Many things you'd take for granted aren't available in Budgie, like an option for showing windows from all workspaces when alt-tabbing. See More

Top Pro

Modern design

Top Con

Very hard to install

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

Top Pro

Built from scratch, but integrates into current technologies

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

Top Con

Sometimes buggy

Budgie can sometimes be buggy. See More

Top Pro

Modern design

Top Con

Does not properly support multi monitor

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

Top Pro

It's minimal and gorgeous

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

Many large distros support it out of the box

Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, and Budgie's own Solus all support Budgie. See More

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

Available from a PPA for Ubuntu

Budgie is available from an official EvolveOS PPA for Ubuntu and its derivatives. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:evolve-os/ppa sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install budgie-desktop See More

Top Pro

It's maintained by a dedicated bunch of folks with an eye for detail

Top Pro

Built from scratch and integrates into current technolgies

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

Top Pro

Windows users will feel at home

Top Pro

Windows users will feel at home.

Top Pro

No big memory leaks

It runs for weeks on end without noticeably increasing its memory footprint. That is a vast improvement over GNOME Shell. See More

Pantheon is working well in Elementary OS but installing it in most distributions will be a manual process requiring some tuning and fixes. See More

Pantheon

Top Pro

Great UI

Top Con

Lack of availability

Specs

Switching between workspaces is fluid, pulling up the workspace preview bumps up the rest of the desktop, open windows show up on the switcher along with larger icons, and everything is subtly animated. You have two windows taking each half the screen by dragging to corners. See More

Programming Language:C

Widget Toolkit:GTK

Languages:Vala

Top Pro

Splitting and animations

Top Con

Not fully customizable

Top Pro

Smooth, subtle animations

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

Top Con

Not available for major Linux distributions

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

Easy to overview workspace

Nonintrusive interface design with a simple, clean aesthetic. See More

Top Con

Few configuration options

It is pretty bare-bones. See More

Top Pro

Slick UI

Fast, out of your way, very nice looking interface. Also good defaults. 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

Intuitive hotkeys

The hotkeys used in Pantheon are often intuitive for things such as launching the terminal, just press the Windows key + T and the terminal will launch. There is also support for custom hotkeys, so users can change them to their liking. 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

Highly modular

While built to be integrated, Pantheon is also highly modular. Shell components like the Panel, Dock, and app launcher can be swapped out with limited repercussions. See More

Top Con

No icons on desktop

Top Con

Still has some bugs

Pantheon is fairly new, and a few bugs are to be expected. See More

Building components of desktop environment will teach you how systems are working under the hood. If you never built your DE or WM you still are at the beginning of the learning curve. See More

Custom

Top Pro

Learning

Top Con

Your computer may get random stuff that you don't use by trying out different things

Although you can uninstall it... e.g. getting three different app launchers, but only using one, or having four different WM . See More

Top Pro

Get all of the stuff that you need

If all you want is a file manager, a terminal emulator, and a text editor; then all you need is that stuff, a DM and a WM See More

Top Con

Time consuming

Top Pro

Fun to build

Top Con

If you want to start from nothing you need Arch/Gentoo/Funtoo/etc

For users with netbooks, tablets and older computers where not a lot of system resources are available. See More

I Recommend...

Built By the Slant team

Find the best product instantly.

Lustre recommends the best products at their lowest prices – right on Amazon.

4.7 star rating

Try it now - it's free

score 215 · Accepted Answer

Xfce

Top Pro

Low system resource consumption

Top Con

Outdated default UI

The default theme that comes with XFCE looks like something you would expect to find on Windows 98. Many PC users do not possess the necessary skills to configure XFCE in a way to look more modern. See More

CleverNona's Experience

Fantastic. I have it in my Archlinux in the last years. See More

Specs

License:GPL, LGPL, BSD

Widget Toolkit:GTK+

The Xfce components are only 287 MiB, all of this without losing any functionality. See More

Top Pro

It has perfect balance between simplicity and usability

Top Con

Default is a bit Ugly

The default setup of the UI is a bit bland and looks dated, very similar to Windows XP or earlier. While it can be customized to look more modern, what is presented upon first install of the DE is not the prettiest DE out there. See More

HumbleZelus's Experience

Works well with Menu customizing using AlaCarte App. Quick to use and easy to tailor. Not awkward like Plasma. Example: See AudioVisual Linux, a pure debian made efficient for AV work. 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

Very slow development

XFCE tends to be extremely slow in it's development. The last release was Xfce 4.12 on Febuary 28, 2015, 3 years ago, with the next release still remaining unknown. See More

I-Ta Hsieh's Experience

It's a very elegant and fast user interface. See More

Top Pro

Designed for productivity

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

GloriousOrcus's Experience

Runs swiftly, can easily get on with work without needing to mess about all the time. See More

Top Pro

Classic and Familiar

Xfce works very much like the classic Gnome & Windows desktops, taskbars (panels) and desktop icons, letting you get your work done without being frustrated. Xfce embodies the traditional UNIX philosophy of modularity and re-usability. It consists of a number of components that provide the full functionality one can expect of a modern desktop environment. They are packaged separately and you can pick among the available packages to create the optimal personal working environment. See More

Top Con

No HiDPI support

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

gevis's Experience

Worked with FXCE for about 4 years since Gnome2 became obsolete and was satisfied with it. Now use Awesome WM but recommend XFCE for those who need DE. See More

Top Pro

Highly stable

XFCE is extremely stable and won’t randomly crash, not often at least. See More

Top Con

Window titlebar text isn't always bang in the centre

Fine for most people but could be a turn off for others. See More

Hypersphere's Experience

Xfce can be ugly right out of the box, but the Linux Mint implementation provides beautiful settings with no further tweaking. The Xfce panel gives me all the apps I need --better than with any other desktop. The only downside to Xfce from my perspective is that it does not enable you to put desktop icons on the right-hand monitor in a multiple-monitor setup, as can be done in KDE and Wndows. See More

Top Pro

It works well in remote environment without troubles

For people who want to remote linux GUI environment, the best choice is XFCE. It can be remote without any delicate techniques via VNC or X2go. See More

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

BraveNabu's Experience

XFCE is extreme lightweight, simple and highly customizable. 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

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

If you used to love old Gnome DE you will love Xfce too

For people who were dissapointed with Gnome 3, Xfce can be easily customized to look like Gnome 2.x See More

Top Con

Looks dated

It just looks like a 20 year old desktop in its stock form. However, it is possible for you to to give it a more elegant look using themes, icons and other customizations. See More

Top Pro

Easy to setup resource monitoring

xfce4-cpugraph-plugin → to see if stuff is stuck doing an infinite loop for example xfce4-netload-plugin → bandwidth xfce4-systemload-plugin → RAM usage See More

Top Con

Lack of mousepad functionalities

The default mousepad doesn't work well on several laptops and a better controller options should be installed. See More

Top Pro

User-friendly

The many options and settings available in Xfce are well presented. The layout is logical and the right amount of explanation is given. This goes a long way to making Xfce seem "simple" when in fact it is quite powerful. See More

Top Con

Lack of useful tools

Top Pro

Rock solid stability

Xfce will never be the cause of your crash. 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

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

Dated Point-and-click "desktop" metaphor

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 Pro

Can mimic HiDPI supoprt

This requires adjusting settings. In Settings Manager → Settings Editor → xsettings → xft DPI can be adjusted. Setting it to around 180 should work well for "Retina" screens. While not full HiDPI support, this can help mitigate small text on a small HiDPI screen. 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 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 Pro

Well-defined Session Manager

Top Pro

Low resource usage combined with flexible configuration

Top Pro

Best for newcomers

Anyone new to Linux feels comfortable using it. See More

Top Pro

Window manager (XFWM) is a compositing WM by default

By having a compositing WM as the default WM makes way for a lot of visual tweaks and tricks that can and do make Xfce look great. You can adjust the transparency, shadows, borders, etc. and many other advanced tweaks are also available. See More

Top Pro

HiDPI support

After release 4.14 Xfce supports HiDPI. See More

Top Pro

Easy to export or import configurations

Top Pro

4.14 has beautiful and functional notifications

Top Pro

Has a convenient launcher and a Genmon plugin

Top Pro

Manages multiple displays with choice of monitor for desktop icons.

Top Pro

Whisker Menu

Easily the best menu for any linux desktop, quick, modern, intuitive and downright pleasant to use. See More

Top Pro

Manages multiple displays with choice of monitor for desktop icons