…what would you use? A tiling wm, a floating wm, xfce, gnome…? Me personally I never really liked DE’s. Besides one, maybe two, I’ve been this openbox geek since…2005-ish ( tempus fugit). Moreover, a lightweight freak. Debian cores with a Bang mindset loaded with scripts, cornerbindings…the works. Fast. Aiming for the under 100 mb boot.
That one wasn’t Debian though. That was one of the most amazing distros I’ve ever seen. Iso was about 100 mb, booted around 28 mb in lxde and was lightning fast. As in…instant. You had fast Pups…and then you had blazing Slitaz.
I took out chunks of the lxde and booted straight into a bang ( tint2/fbpanel/openbox). I actually bought this Napoleonistic pc for twice nothing to see if it would still fly. It did.
If there will be a full object orientated desktop like the OS/2 Warp Workplace Shell (WPS). Which is still only partly reached in the useability. But the new DE I don’t like with there setup.
It was not the design, it was the way to work.
Two examples (hope I remind me well due to the passed 30 years ago)
You generate a file in Images folder, close the application. Shift the file with e.g. command line, open the application and can still open the last file
You genetat a JPEG with applikation A and another JPEG with application B. If you double click in the file manager on the JPEG the right application will open.
Please keep in mind at this time you use VGA screens and Windows 3.1x!
You’re lucky. Your memory serves you well hahahahaha. I started using a computer very late. The only thing I knew about a computer was to edit the prices for my shop on windows…98 something? First pc I bought for daily use was about a year or so before Vista, go figure. That second feature you mentioned was possible in rox or spacefm if I recall correctly.
This is the last, in my opinion decent KDE desktop, until 5, I stopped using KDE during the Version 4 period, because of the, in my opinion, stupid resource hogging, Semantic desktop, at the time I had what was one of the most powerful laptops available, and even that felt sluggish, especially when I was trying to use both Windows and Mac in VMs, for software dev purposes. I solved my problem by moving to a GNOME desktop.
We don’t really have much choice.
Usually, content creators just choose a distribution and use the default or fine tune it, while geeks often want new technologies/specs such as wayland, etc. They prefer to go for an DE that has an active community behind it.
I’ve been using gnome since years ago, after unity was abandoned,Maybe I would try system76 in the future.
I went to GNOME 2 and Unity, and when GNOME 3 replaced GNOME 2, Linux Mint Cinnamon. When a LM Cinnamon upgrade bricked my computer, partly my fault, as I was using a large number of PPAs to get latest software and LM being a Point release, I decide to search for something more suitable for my needs, and found Manjaro KDE.
While it’s possible a lot of the issues I had with KDE4 were fixed during the cycle, I was glad to see the Symantic desktop thing seems to be abandoned in 5… unless it’s just what Manjaro do.
As 3d artist I use a lot Qt based apps, so I am somehow ‘forced’ to use KDE. But from last year I am having big problems with Qt and graphic tablets, that I am gonna, after more than decade of only using Linux, probably to switch to Win or OSX…
I’m sure I’m a rare-case here, since I’ve started contributing to KDE after seeing/using KDE applications on Haiku. Then gave neon a spin… and things happened. So I could say Haiku I guess.
Lol, BeOS is what set me on the path to Linux, and KDE, circa 2000. I still keep a Haiku virtual machine around, just to have fun with. I think I would go to that, or finally begin to live in the terminal, or something.
If not KDE Plasma, then Cinnamon. I don’t see any other DEs suitable for my digital life and work. They are less functional than Plasma. In general, DEs based on GTK except Cinnamon are inferior to Plasma, and either their applications lack functionalities (GNOME) or they simply don’t have their own application ecosystem and rely on GNOME programs (others including Cinnamon). I don’t see suitable DEs even outside the world of free Unix. The macOS environment is counterproductive and its window management is inferior. Windows either.
If I had to choose the worst DE, it would be GNOME, because it’s ugly and oversimplified.
Mainly one of the key components of Plasma that I miss every single time I for some reason don’t have it is the filepicker. Its such a small thing but its crucial. Having to do the same song and dance where the focused textbox just makes you search instead of naming a file? No thank you. Mixed files and folder? Please no. No images? Nope. No scrolling in to see larger images? Hell no.
Dolphin is an insanely versatile detail and the filepicker in Plasma is just too darn good.
So if I didn’t have that, dump me in a terminal instead please-and-thank-you. So i3 or Sway.
