Look at Fedora (if you like RPM distros) if you’re after something pretty nicely put together that stays reasonably well up to date. Very well maintained. Influenced by Red Hat (or “led by” or even “owned by”), which works for some, not for others.
CachyOS is trendy these days. EndeavourOS is basically Arch with an installer.
There are a few distros targeted at Windows refugees. ZorinOS is well regarded. AnduinOS is a newer entry. But if you’re willing to walk away from a Windows-like UI, skip these.
Arch has an installer these days. It works pretty well and you can have a system up and running in about 20 minutes if you have a fast internet connection.
For people that want a Windows like UI, I would probably suggest Cinnamon. It works pretty much like Windows 7/10 without all the visual nonsense that KDE typically has.
My experience is that KDE 6 has very little visual nonsense right out of the box. 4 and 5 did have a lot more, but most/all of it could be disabled. Most other Linux DEs don't really let you customize them to your own personal level of nonsense at any rate.
This is a screenshot from their site. Just in this screenshot I see the following:
1) there is an horrendous text shadow effect on the text under the "Home" desktop icon in the top left.
2) Clock text is too large compared to the rest of the interface, especially the icons next to it.
3) Trash Icon looks like out of place compared to the other icons.
4) Drop shadow effect on the window and the start menu thing. It kinda too dark really.
5) Every single gap between interface elements seems different and off. The icon sizes seem a bit all over the place.
6) There is a gradient on the window title bar and rounded corners. Cinnamon does this as well. I dunno it is very Window XP Luna (which I never liked).
7) The window control icons look off to me and don't fit in with the rest of the interface IMO.
A lot of this I appreciate can be probably be changed. But that is how it comes OOTB if it is an official screenshot. It feels like a Windows Vista ripoff.
Generally I find KDE lacks "taste". None of the Linux GUIs are that great tbh. People put up fancy screenshots, but I guarantee the moment the windows are arranged in any other way it looks not so great.
I agree with your assessment of KDE lacking "taste". Imo, it looks like a system designed by engineers, not designers.
GNOME has the opposite problem imo. I feel like it has "taste", but it feels like a system fully designed by designers, with no engineers giving practical pushback. It's the same issue macOS has, but amplified: Designers have some grand idea about their vision being the one true way of using the system and made it hard to impossible to customize.
I currently use KDE, but am not happy with it for the reasons you described. I used to use GNOME, but wasn't happy with it for the reasons above.
I have high hopes for Cosmic [0]. It seems like that one might get the balance right.
> I agree with your assessment of KDE lacking "taste". Imo, it looks like a system designed by engineers, not designers.
TBF, I was linked their more up to date screenshots in a sibling thread and it does look more consistent but it still seems off.
> I currently use KDE, but am not happy with it for the reasons you described. I used to use GNOME, but wasn't happy with it for the reasons above.
I don't like any of the Linux DEs tbh. They all have issues.
I might give KDE a go. But I think Debian does a poor job at packaging it and I don't really want to change distros.
> I have high hopes for Cosmic [0]. It seems like that one might get the balance right.
I tried compiling Cosmic on source on Debian 12. I ran out of memory on the VM I was doing it on. I also found out that on Debian 12 their rustc was broken!
Do you think GNOME has similar UI issues? In my view, it's "pretty", but just doesn't let me configure it the way I want it to without hacking around way too much.
I ended up installing Dash To Dock and Ubuntu App Indicator Icons when I was using it and I ended up with something decent. I also usually have to faff around in the gnome tweaks tool to get the old "legacy" apps and the new apps looking consistent.
With that level of nit picking everything is off and there is no OS / DE with zero inconsistencies.
KDE is good for me. I admit that I simplify the interface in a new setup turning off some things but the fact that it gives me that capability is a huge plus for me.
> With that level of nit picking everything is off and there is no OS / DE with zero inconsistencies.
It isn't nitpicking. Those are like quite noticeable and actually quite bad. By the looks of it, a lot of this has been addressed now. But tbh it shouldn't have been there in the first place.
Of course there isn't any OS/DE with inconsistencies the fact that I spot that within like literally a few seconds on such a basic screenshot is indicative of other issues.
Even if it was nitpicking, to create something of high quality you should be extremely critical of your own work. That is how you actually make improvements.
> KDE is good for me. I admit that I simplify the interface in a new setup turning off some things but the fact that it gives me that capability is a huge plus for me.
Things shouldn't need a bunch of changes out of the box for them to be okay. I find that KDE (and have always had this impression since KDE 2 or 3) is it feels they bung a bunch of features in as a checklist. That doesn't create a good interface.
Unfortunately people will defend it. I am not sure why.
Stock Konsole on the left, stock Ghostty on the right. Note that both terminals have multiple tabs open. The amount of wasted space and visual noise in Konsole is baffling. Not to mention Ghostty is able to display 4 more lines of actual console output (you know, the whole point of a console).
In my experience, many KDE apps follow the same UX. Great for configuration and being able to use primarily the mouse, bad if you are more interested in a keyboard centric flow with a focus on the content.
KDE actually was built around the Windows paradigm; Gnome is a Mac clone. Cinnamon is a fork of Gnome maintained as a side project from a distro with a bad security and management track record. Really the only thing it adds is a launcher; KDE optionally provides the same style if the user wants it.
Go find a thread where your pet software is on topic. This thread is about KDE Connect. Does Cinnamon support that? Does Cinnamon offer anything like it?
> Cinnamon? Really? In a KDE Connect thread?
> Go find a thread where your pet software is on topic.
> This thread is about KDE Connect. Does Cinnamon support that?
In this particular part of thread, people were talking about Windows UI replacements. Like it or not conversations do diverge from the original intended purpose.
Secondly, Cinnamon isn't my "pet software". Cinnamon IMO is more similar to the Windows 7/10/11 UI than KDE and has none of the fluff that KDE normally has in it. I actually don't really like any of the Linux UIs. I think they all suffer from significant issues.
> KDE actually was built around the Windows paradigm; Gnome is a Mac clone. Cinnamon is a fork of Gnome maintained as a side project from a distro with a bad security and management track record. Really the only thing it adds is a launcher; KDE optionally provides the same style if the user wants it.
It seems that you really don't like cinnamon and thus why you are being so aggressive. I don't really appreciate the unwarranted hostility.
I don't personally use Linux Mint (I use Debian). I don't like derivative distros for the reason that you highlighted. However Cinnamon seems works reasonably well and tends to be quite a bit lighter than KDE IME.
> This thread is about KDE Connect. Does Cinnamon support that? Does Cinnamon offer anything like it?
You are aware that you can use KDE software in other Desktop Environments? It took me a few seconds to do a web search and it seems that you can use KDE connect and Cinnamon at the same time.
Why Slackware specifically? You can install any distribution. I use Gentoo btw - not really a distribution so much as a distribution construction kit. There are other popular distros, notably Arch.
In my case, it's my distro since always. I'm not at all one of those h4xx0r types, I'm just a lawyer, translator and theologian (and professor) doing my job with Linux. I started using Linux in May 2000 with a boxed version of Red Hat 6.2, then went to Red Hat 7.1, 7.2, then switched to Mandrake until 9.2 came about, and the dependency hell really irked me. So I searched alternatives. About 2003-2004 (not sure really) I began to use it. It was easy for me to configure it. I always used my Linux on laptops, at that time if I wanted to be online I had to setup a Winmodem, and maybe other hardware. That meant that even on "friendlier" distros such as Red Hat or Mandrake I had to tinker with the command line and config files.
Thus, when the time came, upgrading to Slackware came naturally. And I appreciated that it always was fast and lean, consuming much less resources than other distros. Now that's not so crucial, but in the early 2000's it was quite important.
Slackware was there at the right time, offering me what I needed, and it was fast and lean. And I like its simple approach to system maintenance; I can get a good grasp of the whole system.
Also, at the time Gentoo was just beginning and (again) I was using dialup Internet, paying by the minute, and I really didn't appreciate the prospect of compiling almost everything. Other distros (such as Arch) were also beginning.
For me, an OS should be something I never have to think about, slackware gives me that. Very little has changed in all the years I have used it and almost everything I learned all those years ago when I first installed it still applies. The scripts I wrote over a decade ago to setup and install some stuff on a fresh install, still work 100% and the only change I have made is to have it enabled PipeWire, which is one command.
I liked Slackware a lot way back when. No deeper reason.
Currently leaning towards Debian Testing, but that might depend on my testing of Slackware now. I use Arch daily in WSL, but I've have had enough breakages that I don't want it as my primary OS.
I use Debian 13 (stable). It is very solid. I was using Debian Trixie when it was testing and there was breakage twice.
I would make the /boot partition twice the size the installer suggests though as on my laptop I can't upgrade the kernel because the /boot runs out of space. The laptop is used to view old manuals in PDFs while working on my car so I don't really care.
TBH any of the major Linux distros that have been around for a while are fine. I don't like Fedora or Ubuntu because they are a bit corporate.
I personally wouldn't bother with any of the derivative distros. Typically there isn't a lot different other than they've pre-configured some packages. IME that causes more headaches long term.
Yeh. I'm used to using old version of RHEL at work so I ended up learning how to deal with slow moving distros.
I use the OS as a base system and most of the stuff that needs to be newer versions can be done by installing the binary to to ~/bin as it is added to your path by ~/.profile if the directory exists on Debian.
Stuff like Discord, Slack, Kdenlive, OBS etc. I install using flatpak.
Other stuff. Go, Vim (I compile vim from source) and nvim can stuff can be compiled or dropped into /usr/local
That covers most stuff IME. However I appreciate this won't work for everyone.
The stable distribution might be a little dated, but the -current development branch is really solid. In my very subjective impression, it is more stable than many distros' stable releases. If you're not afraid of doing some hand-tuning and configuring things the old ways, you should reeally try it, especially with community packages such as Plasma 6, Chromium and LibreOffice (the latest release).
Slackware-current is pretty current. And sbopkg has quite a lot of packages. I run it on my homeserver (and has been for the last..10-15? years or so). Since everything that I host uses docker its easy as pie to keep it running.
ZFS via ZoL etc.
As a daily driver i use PopOs! which is very nice since the've packaged nvidiadrivers etc. and I mainly use it to play games.
It is doing well, I run both current and 15, rock solid, stable both in use and features. It has never given me anything to complain about, OS stays out of your way and even running current I never have to think about my system or worry about what is going to happen when I update. It all just works and sticks to the slackware way.
It's doing very well. The Slackware 15.0 release is now a few years old, though the packages are still being updated. Slackware-current has latest everything.
