alt Hacker NewsI used to love Xfce, when KDE felt clunky to me and Gnome went in directions I found insane. Since then Gnome remains Gnome, but KDE has matured to a stage where most of the defaults feel like they were designed for me - and any that doesn't can be easily changed. After a period of using more and more K* applications, I realized I might as well switch desktop... Xfce is now a fond memory, and the times have moved on.
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Xfce is my default go-to, but I recommend and use KDE for touchscreens, like for Surface tablets.
I had a similar experience. I only moved from xfce when my nvidia board kept killing my X session in creative ways. I'm pleasantly satisfied with kde, but I only have high praise for xfce usability.
I’m still on xfce, but haven’t used KDE in more than 10 years. Hearing lots of good things about it lately so maybe it’s time to give it another shot.
KDE 3.5 has been the best desktop environment for me (mainly due to its extreme customization facilities), far better than the contemporaneous Windows XP or Mac OS X, while the following KDE 4 was an unusable atrocious piece of garbage (despite having waited to make the transition to KDE 4 until it was claimed that all its initial bugs had been solved; when I tried it there were no bug problems, only bad design choices that could not be altered in any way).
For a few years I had kept the last KDE 3.5, but eventually I grew tired of solving compatibility problems with newer programs and I switched to XFCE.
I am still using it because I have never seen any reason to use anything else. There are a few KDE or Gnome applications that I use (for instance Okular or Kate), but I have not encountered yet any compatibility problem with them, so I have no need for one of the more bloated environment systems.
I have been using Linux on a variety of laptops and desktops, all with XFCE and without problems. XFCE does not do much, but I do not want it to do more, it allows my GUIs to be beautiful and to reach maximum speed and it has decent customization facilities, which is very important for me, as I have never encountered any desktop environment where I can be content with its default configuration.
Whenever I happen to temporarily use some Windows version for some work-related activity, I immediately feel constrained in a straitjacket by the rigidity of the desktop environment, which does not allow me to configure it in a way that would please me and would not interfere with my work.
On my main desktop, and also on my mobile workstation laptop, I have used only NVIDIA GPUs for the last 20 years and I have never encountered even the slightest problem with them, at least not with XFCE, so I am always surprised when other users mention such problems, like another poster near this message.
Perhaps my lack of problems with NVIDIA may be explained by the fact that I am using Gentoo, so I always have up-to-date NVIDIA drivers, while the users of other distributions mention having some problems with updating the drivers.
Only in my latest desktop, which was assembled this summer, I have installed an Intel Battlemage GPU, instead of an NVIDIA GPU, because the Intel GPU has increased its FP64 throughput, while the NVIDIA GPUs have decreased their FP64 throughput. Thus I hope that Intel will not abandon the GPU market, even if the intentions of their current CEO are extremely nebulous.
As an example of some very simple customizations, which are trivial on XFCE but surprisingly difficult on other desktop environments, I use a desktop with a completely blank, neutral grey background, without icons or any other visual clutter. I launch applications from a menu accessed with a right mouse click or with CTRL-ESC, and I have an auto-hiding taskbar for minimized applications and for a very small number of utilities, e.g. a clock/calendar and a clipboard manager. A few frequently used applications are bound to hot keys.
I want to like KDE, but it's just too unreliable for me. My last foray was about a year or two ago, I had to stop using it because an update something in KDE's power management broke and my laptop no longer reliably suspended when the battery was low (manually triggered suspends still worked fine.) I've been repeatedly having experiences like this with KDE, each time I fall back on LXQt with kwin and everything looks a bit uglier but just simply works.
I don't know what's going on in KDE, but I assume they've got too many software architects with their heads in the clouds, designing a byzantine mess of abstraction and indirection until even they lose track of where in the code the functionality actually lives. That's all just my assumption though, all I really know is that basic features keep breaking between releases.