LinuxWindowsDesktop Environment

What are the best desktop environments for people migrating from Windows to Linux?

8

Options Considered

115

Recommendations

2 hrs ago

Last Updated

Here’s the Deal

The best 1 of 8 OptionsWhy?

8 Options Considered	Price	License	Programming Language
Excellent Cinnamon		GPL	mostly C
KDE		–	–
Xfce		GPL, LGPL,BSD-2-Clause	mostly C
MATE		GPL	mostly C
Budgie		–	–

Cinnamon

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Top Pro

Designed for traditional desktops

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

Top Pro

Responsive developers

The community has a lot of say in how the product evolves. No ivory tower syndrome (plaguing other projects).

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.

Top Pro

Easy transition

It's easy to switch from Windows to Linux Mint.

Top Pro

Simple and easy to get used to

KDE is too confusing for newbies, Mint is easy to install and intuitive

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.

Top Pro

Linux Mint Cinnamon has been the most successful OS in the past 3-5 years. For Good Reason.

It was the first distro to make all codecs and proprietary software, run flawlessly out-of-the-box. While customizable, it is one of the few that look great out of the box too.

Top Con

Crashes

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

Top Con

Has been known to have issues with Steam even in the past year

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7 Other Options Considered

KDE

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Top Pro

Highly customisable

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

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 file...

Top Pro

Looks beautiful

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

Top Pro

Integrated components

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...

Top Pro

Open source

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 u...

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+...

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.

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 a...

Top Pro

Active Development

Top Pro

The session manager works perfectly

This is a much better session manager compared to solutions from other Linux desktop environments.

Top Pro

Bunch of coherent applications

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

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...

Top Pro

The search with the Windows Key is as awesome

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 18 more Pros & Cons

See 18 more Pros & Cons

Xfce

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Top Pro

Very stable

Xfce will never be the cause of your crash.

Top Pro

It has perfect balance between simplicity and usability

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

Top Pro

Lightweight

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

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 fu...

Top Pro

Very customisable

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.

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.

Top Pro

Low system resource consumption

Not just helpful for older computers where few system resources are available, but also simply for those who want to get the most out of their systems.

Top Pro

Designed for productivity

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

Top Pro

Best for newcomers

Any one new to Linux feels comfortable using it.

Top Pro

HiDPI display support

It has HiDPI support, but 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.

Top Con

Very slow developement

XFCE tends to be extremely slow in it's development. It has been two and a half years since its last release with the next release still remaining unknown.

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.

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.

Top Con

Unsupported by Canonical, crappy dist-upgrades

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 13 more Pros & Cons

See 13 more Pros & Cons

MATE

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Top Pro

Easy on resources

Barely going above 220MB of RAM use out of the box

Top Pro

Modern experience at low-cost resources.

Based on gtk3 makes it compatible with modern theming and still lightweight making your system use the resources in the apps not in the desktop environment.

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,...

Top Pro

Distraction-free environment

Top Pro

Decently customizable

Can customize a lot of its aspects, and using a window manager like Compiz.

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 adopt...

Top Pro

Very stable

Code base is very stable and virtually bug-free.

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.

Top Pro

Has window borders

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

Top Pro

Has menu icons

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

Top Con

No official forum

Instead of having an official forum, users are redirected to their distributions support forums.

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See 9 more Pros

Budgie

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Know any positive aspects of this option?

Top Con

Less light weight than you would expect

Budgie has a nice and simple style, but the memory usage is quite high after booting.

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.

Top Con

Does not properly support multi monitor

Top Con

Package manager is hard to use

All systems that use anything other then dpkg or RPM are just useless since you can't install external apps e.g. TeamViewer by clicking and must use stupid commands or extraction tools that don't work

Top Con

Very hard to install

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

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See 4 more Cons

Zorin OS

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Top Pro

Good Selection of pre-installed software

New users may be unaware of what software is available for Linux, but Zorin includes a good selection for everyday tasks out of the box.

Top Pro

Partial Windows compatibility

Zorin includes WINE and PlayOnLinux to run many Windows applications and games.

Top Pro

Low resources consumption

Top Pro

Stable

Top Pro

Installer can set up dual boot

Top Pro

Familiar Windows-style UI

The desktop UI was made to resemble Windows 7, although alternative settings are also available.

Top Con

Buggy

Crashes a lot then log's people out and is very buggy, requiring you to reinstall again only to find it happens again.

Top Con

Limited desktop styles in Free Version

All free editions only offer Windows XP, 2000, and 7 and Gnome 2. You have to pay $9-10 in order to get Unity (Ubuntu) and Mac OS X themes.

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See 6 more Pros & Cons

ElementaryOS

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Clean, slick and just works

Top Pro

Very simple to use

Practically anyone can use it within an hour of its install - great concept!

Top Pro

Apps you need, without ones you don't

Top Pro

Easy operating system for users who like to change from MS Windows/Mac.

More powerful than MS Windows and good looking like Mac. Benefits for advanced users and easy to regular users.

Know any negative aspects of this option?

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See 3 more Pros

Gnome

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Top Pro

Easy to use

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

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.

Top Pro

Adheres to standards

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

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.

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.

Top Pro

Great for high dpi displays

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

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 real...

Top Pro

Customizable with easy-to-install extensions

With the right plugin enabled in your browser (comes with Firefox by default) you can browse and install with two clicks the many Shell Extensions available from http://extensions.gnome.org. These are listed automatically based upon the version of Gnome Shell you currently have installed.

Top Pro

Powerful search

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

Top Pro

Online account management

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

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.

Top Pro

Fallback mode offers a classic look

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

Top Con

No taskbar by default

GNOME doesn't have a taskbar by default, and might be confusing to people migrating from Windows for that reason. It is however possible to install it through http://extensions.gnome.org.

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.

Top Con

Extension system is basically unsupported

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

Top Con

Session Manager does NOT work,

Session Manager does NOT work, and not for 8 years - yes EIGHT!. Don't get me wrong I LOVE Ubuntu-Gnome but a recent re-attempt at KDE Neon is working FLAWLESSLY, and FINALLY type in session in the search and a great GUI called Desktop Session opens up giving ALL expected options and a few mo...

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See 14 more Pros & Cons

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115 Community Recommendations

+74

Request recommendations from the community

Contributor for 3 years

12

Total Rec's

100

Total Karma

Recommended 5 days ago by Mark

ImaginativeHygieia

Contributor for 12 days

1

Total Rec's

0

Total Karma

Recommended 12 days ago by ImaginativeHygieia

Beautiful, fast and stable. :)

Apps you need, without ones you don't

Very simple to use

Clean, slick and just works

Easy operating system for users who like to change from MS Windows/Mac.

RespectfulAnput

Contributor for 2 months

1

Total Rec's

85

Total Karma

Recommended 2 months ago by RespectfulAnput

Elementary OS has a consistent visual language, and a growing set of third party apps that were designed specifically for elementary. It runs great, even on older hardware.

CooperativePtah

Contributor for 2 months

1

Total Rec's

50

Total Karma

Recommended 2 months ago by CooperativePtah

I always go back to Xfce. Ease of customisation and how lightweight it is results in something I like the look of without it drain a lot of resources.

Contributor for 6 months

22

Total Rec's

945

Total Karma

Recommended 3 months ago by C_Corp2k2

A great choice for people switching over. I knew of Ubuntu when I transitioned, but I wanted to keep most of my games and programs. This is a good bet on compatibility, when in the transition.

Familiar Windows-style UI

Good Selection of pre-installed software

Installer can set up dual boot

Low resources consumption

Partial Windows compatibility

Contributor for 2 months

2

Total Rec's

0

Total Karma

Recommended 2 months ago by ExcitedPan

No problem for my mom, neither any client I ever migrated (with a lot o fear from their part before using for the first time), the first impression is always: WOW! So fast!...

Active Development

Highly customisable

Integrated components

KDE is an evolution on the classic desktop model

Adheres to standards

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

Keyboard friendly

Integrated advanced search

Multi-Device "Convergence"

Looks beautiful

Bunch of coherent applications

The session manager works perfectly

The search with the Windows Key is as awesome

Contributor for a year

2

Total Rec's

650

Total Karma

Recommended 3 months ago by fabricio

Amazing Desktop Environment. It looks amazing. Some default theme are a bit outdated but there is A LOT of GTK3 modern themes, icons, docks like plank, is very customizable. Is lightweight, easy to use daily. Just Amazing. The application set included are super nice!!

Easy on resources

Works great on old machines

Traditional desktop experience

Decently customizable

Distraction-free environment

Multiple panels work great across multiple displays

Modern experience at low-cost resources.

No official forum

TirelessHasameli

Contributor for 2 months

1

Total Rec's

30

Total Karma

Recommended 2 months ago by TirelessHasameli

Very stable and costumizeble

Best for newcomers

InventiveAntevorta

Contributor for 2 months

2

Total Rec's

75

Total Karma

2 months ago by InventiveAntevorta

Crashes a lot and logs people out and is very buggy.

Limited desktop styles in Free Version

TrustworthyCastor

Contributor for 5 months

2

Total Rec's

0

Total Karma

Recommended 4 months ago by TrustworthyCastor

Budgie is more like Windows 10 desktop environment, i like it more than Cinnamon

Currently displaying 10 out of 115 total recommendations.

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