Last Updated on May 27, 2022
Development
In many situations, using software in an alpha or beta stage of development is perfectly acceptable. It’s uncommon for a software crash to affect other running applications. But with a desktop environment, stability is more important.
Most of the software surveyed in this article are extremely mature with polished code. For example, KDE was founded in 1996. Development has been through a rollercoaster ride with a particularly sticky patch with KDE 4, but since the release of KDE Plasma 5 in July 2014, the DE has excelled. GNOME was founded in 1997, slightly later than KDE. The strikingly different GNOME 3 received a lot of criticism when released in 2011, but it remains the default desktop of multiple distributions.
Some users feel GNOME 3 forces them to adapt to how the developers want. The criticism of GNOME 3 led to developers forking GNOME 2, with Mate and Cinnamon DEs the most popular of the derivatives. GNOME has inspired some of the most popular desktop environments.
Like GNOME, Enlightenment saw its first release in 1997. Back then it was a composting window manager only, not a full-blown DE. With the release of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, it can rightly be described as a DE.
LXQt is in an early stage of development. It’s first release came in 2013, and it’s still some way from a stable release. We found lots of annoying bugs which makes it difficult to recommend, but it shows tons of promise. Give it a few more years. Budgie also saw its first release in 2013. Early releases were extremely flakey, but it’s seen rapid development.
Xfce’s origin dates back to 1996, the same as KDE. It hasn’t seen a new stable release for the past few years. But the project is still under development even if it’s somewhat glacial in progress.
The Deepin distro saw its first release in 2004, but up to 2013 it used Xfce, LXDE, GNOME 2 and then GNOME 3 as its DE. From the release of Deepin 12.12.1 in 2013, the distro uses its own DE.
Closing Thoughts
Variety is the spice of life, and there’s plenty of choices to make for desktop environments.
Desktop environments can have huge implications for your productivity. For a minority, these environments can actually get in the way of getting things done. For example, if you’re using a really low-spec hardware, a desktop environment may be overkill, and all you really need to be productive is a good window manager. There are a few Linux distributions such as Puppy Linux that are happy to offer a window manager without a DE. Or you could try running with only a window manager like awesome or bspwm.
This is not an exhaustive survey of DEs. If you want to cast the net further, you might want to try Pantheon or Trinity Desktop Environment. The former is a desktop environment originally created for the elementary OS distribution. It is not a fork. The environment is written in Vala, using GTK3 and Granite. It shares some features with GNOME Shell and macOS. Trinity Desktop Environment is a fork of K Desktop Environment 3.5. Another DE worthy of a mention is LXDE, which is extremely lightweight. If there’s sufficient interest, we’ll cover them in a later feature.
Back to the Beginning: Page 1 – Intro & Features
Pages in this survey:
Page 1 – Features
Page 2 – User Experience
Page 3 – System Resources
Page 4 – Extensibility
Page 5 – Documentation & Support
Page 6 – Development / Closing Thoughts
Learn more about the features offered by each desktop environment. We’ve compiled a dedicated page for each desktop environment explaining, in detail, the features each offers together with screenshots.
| Desktop Environments | |
|---|---|
| GNOME | Simple, elegant and well designed desktop environment |
| KDE Plasma | KDE's lightweight, simple, but very robust and full featured desktop |
| MATE | The continuation of GNOME 2 with traditional metaphors |
| Cinnamon | Derives from GNOME 3 with traditional desktop metaphor conventions |
| Xfce | Aims to be a fast and lightweight desktop environment |
| Enlightenment | Desktop environment when used with the EFL |
| Deepin DE | Desktop environment of the Deepin Linux distro |
| Budgie Desktop | Familiar, modern and functional experience. Home for Solus OS |
| LXQt | Next generation of LXDE |
Nothing beats Unity.
Zach: Your comment has no validity because it is unsubstantiated.
Why not tell the world why, in your opinions, Unity is superior to all other desktop environments?
What is most significant about the desktop development described in the article is the shift of more and more desktops from being based on GTK/Gnome libraries to Qt libraries.
And does Trinity Desktop (“KDE3.5 lives on”) deserve not even a mention or has it died from obsolescence?
You didn’t read the article very carefully, as Trinity Desktop gets a mention.
There isn’t a general shift to Qt, only one is moving over.
And people are entitled to form an opinion, they don’t have to justify their opinion. In any event an opinion is neither right nor wrong.
“Trinity Desktop gets a mention”
Yes I missed that reference at the very end on page 6.
“And people are entitled to form an opinion”
Of course they are entitled to form and opinion and express it, but if the opinion is expressed without justification, then the opinion has no merit.
As to whether opinions are “neither right nor wrong” you must therefore accept that an opinion consisting of
“All persons with the surname Mortimer must be put to death for the good of the country”
is neither right nor wrong.
Or consider the opinion that
“Free speech (including all opinions) must be banned by law and a constitutional amendment made to enforce this.”
Would you consider a politicians who espoused that opinion to be neither right nor wrong in holding that opinion?
Opinions have consequences …
Look no further than the opinions of GNOME desktop developers and the change from classic GNOME 2 to the flatland of GNOME 3.
Your statement about putting persons to death conflates an opinion with an action. And it’s totally off-topic and irrelevant. We are talking about individuals’ opinions on computer software.
GNOME desktop developers are fully entitled to form their opinion about their software product, and the direction they see best for the project. While you may disagree with their approach, people are free to use a different desktop environment should they wish. For many of us, removing features can actually improve a product, making it easy to maintain, concentrate on what we actually think is most important etc etc
Trinity Desktop was covered in a subsequent article, https://www.linuxlinks.com/linux-desktop-environments-pantheon-trinity-lxde/
Except for KDE, GNOME, MATE, Xfce, etc
Except Unity was cancelled. While Unity8 is in development, it’s not ready for production use on the desktop yet. No one should be using Unity8 for anything other than developing/testing.
The BEST DE doesn’t exist, just as anything best, simply because everything is a matter of opinion, taste, required functionality, etc. Some prefer to waste system resources (RAM, CPU, Disk space) for “eye candy” (KDE Plasma, Gnome 3, etc.). I prefer distraction free workspace, pure functionality and simplicity, which is why I use LXDE or MATE (based on Gnome 2). I don’t like anything Qt based and prefer GTK2 and GTK3.
As I was trying to stretch as much life out of a then 10 year-old, 3 GB laptop, I found OpenBox with the Tint2 launcher perfectly usable, while costing the least in terms of RAM and CPU.
After I finally broke down and bought a more capable machine, KDE Plasma all the way.
I feel too handcuffed by the GNOME paradigm.
Good morning Sir.
I agree with you in that there’s no such thing as the best DE, but there are objective reasons to mention that a given DE would be more fitting to given use cases, hardware limitations, and technical skills, as you did.
To put this into perspective, both Emacs and Vim are excellent text editors – but I believe Emacs fits more to my use case, and I’m entitled to be vocal about it, on my own blog, while accounting for the limitations of the software and calling for more modern replacements. I’m not entitled, in the strict context of so-called editors wars, to assert my favorite text editor on every use case out there. Actually, I only see people doing this on social media, not in my local technical-minded orgs.
While we should account for and live in harmony with a plurality of norms – treating tolerance as a contract, I’m not advocating for tolerating hate language! – some things are just more practical for some goals, which I believe imply for a rather large part living up to one’s values.
This is why MisterBee has mentioned he preferred Openbox on old hardware, regardless of his personal taste in terms of appearance (which can subjectively be considered as good or bad, in an objective state of relationships between social groups, and between these groups and cultural products that are made, selected, and commercialized to fit to given “subjective” tastes).
Thank you for your attention, have a nice day!
Pantheon Rocks
I’d like to see Pantheon covered as well as LXDE.
Plasma is lightweight? Not in my experience it’s not, but I use it because I like it, but only on my beefier machines
The new Deepin DE 15.8 could be the best one. easy, to use, stable and alsi beautiful
In my opinion, Xfce is the best. Thunar file manager with his custom actions replaced most of the apps for me.
LXDE is lightweight and rather snazzy
LXDE is the lightest and snappiest functional DE you can install.
Esthetically Plasma wins hands down, XFCE has the best mix of all.
Deepin DE is nicer looking, actually.
Adding actually to the end of a sentence doesn’t turn an opinion into a fact…
“Desktop environments (now abbreviated as DE) provide their own window manager[.]”
It’s not important for the definition of a desktop environment if it provides ‘its own’ window manager. The important thing is that it includes one. For example, LXDE and LXQt use Openbox as their window manager, which is an independent project.
“Ultimately, a DE is a piece of software.”
Well, a desktop environment (in the sense of a desktop application suite, like KDE, GNOME, Xfce etc.) is rather a collection of programs, which are, ultimately, pieces of software.
“Atril […] is excellent.”
I’m afraid it isn’t, because contrary to Okular, its full-text search won’t recognize a search word whenever it is split on a line break. (Tested with Atril 1.20.3 vs. Okular 0.26.1.)
“In many situations, using software in an alpha or beta stage of development is perfectly acceptable.”
I don’t think so. But maybe someone can name a few of those many situations (especially concerning alpha software). Seriously, the only situation in which it is “perfectly acceptable” to use alpha or beta software, is when someone is testing that software.
“It’s uncommon for a software crash to affect other running applications.”
That is, unless these applications are running on top of the software that crashes. For example, if an X server crashes, or something goes wrong when waking a laptop from hibernation – which are both not exactly uncommon, in my experience –, that is going to have a lot of impact on other applications (though they’re admittedly not running ones in the latter case).
I Think Wayland is important and hopefully we will have 7 desktops working with Wayland in the autumn 2020. Gnome, Plasma, Enlightenment, Lxqt, Mate,Sway and Budgie.
Wayland has been in development for a decade, and who uses it?
yeah, it’s just like HaikuOS and ReactOS, developed for years and never saw the day of an rather official release lol.
Cinnamon is not derived from Gnome 2 as the author states. It is based on Gnome 3 technologies with heavy modification so that it resembles the original Gnome 2 desktop paradigm.
Typo corrected, thanks
“documentation is generally awful, people hate writing it”
I have wanted to write some docs many times but the DEs and distros wikis where I tried didnt permits to write original content in other lenguage than english; one has to send his work in english and then translate to his lenguage if he wants. O_O
First of all most people on the Earth DOESN’T speak english, and the mayority if the others, do it very badly, as you can verify in most english post all over the internet, starting with this post of me. So, if I want to write in a non too vomitive english I have to consult dictionaries and grammar guides all the time, making the tedious task of writin documentation, 4 or 5 times more tedious and time consumer and irritating.
But is even worst that being GNU/Linux a free, libre, project; being an initiative that wants to democratize the tecnology; being KDE and Gnome and the mayority of the desktop environment writen by non americans nor other english speaking countries it is absurd and imperialist to obligate the people that ofers to write documentation, to do it in a foreign lenguage. Excuse me, but if I give my time for free to write something that I already know, for the benefit of others, I do it in my damn lenguage; and if you dont understand, just dont read it or f*king go to Deepl and copy-paste the text to translate it and then, if you are nice and generous enough with your time, post that translation, previous revision, in the english language section of the documentation wiki!
But no, they prefer that milliards of potential users that are of chinese, hispanics, arabics, french speakers, rusians, etc, dont have documentation in their lenguages if americans dont have it first. Well, dear DE “dictators”, f*k off!
Sorry to be so rude, but it’s the plain and simple truth. There is no good and updated documentation in big part because of the fault of that “gringophilic” dictators of the majority of the software development and documentation projects.
I have nothing against the english lenguage, I am using it right now (if one can call “english” this), but if I can write quickly, with clear, precise and correct grammar and rich vocabulary in my native lenguage whuy the hell I have to do it in other lenguage that I cant manage well nor write it correctly even spending 4 times the time I spend writing in my mother lenguage? Why I have to work to make the world a place less diverse and more culturaly colonized? No, thanks.
All my colaborations in this sense have gone to Wikipedia. Big parts of most articles in my lenguage’s Wikipedia, about Mate, Gnome, KDE Plasma, Gimp, Krita, and several other programs I use a lot and think that could be considered “power user” have writen by me, at least originally, of course in WP colaborates a lot of people that modifies what others have writen previously. Wikipedia is not a documentation site and the articles have to be rasonably short and not very profound, but is a place where nobody is going to forbid me to write in whatever lenguage I wat.
So, dear documentation systems rulers, keep on telling good will people that we have to write in english or nothing, and the response will be “nothing”, and the documentation in Linux world will keep being a sh*t forever.
You seem well suited to write for Wikipedia, a very unreliable source of information.
I beg you pardon?
Excuse me but without digressing too much on you gratuitous attack on the Wikipedia project, which – as I apparently need to add it right there, your opinion – is a plain lie, which collaborative projects have you even written for?
Given your behavior, I’d bet you’d had trouble with collaborating with anyone at the time of writing this message.
No, it’s not a lie. It’s an opinion. An opinion is neither right nor wrong.
And I actually agree with H Ent. The problem with Wikipedia is that there’s often very little verification of factual information. Personal bio information is often questionable. I’ve heard radio interviewers admit that when they used Wikipedia for background information on the guest they are to interview, the interviewee disputes the factual information gleaned from Wikipedia.
Some of the sources quoted on Wikipedia are highly questionable publications, or other sources which are just not reliable. It’s like treating say The Sun as an authoritative source of information.
Even reputable organisations like the BBC contain lots of factually inaccurate or biased information or information that fits their agenda. This then appears in Wikipedia as facts when it’s not.
And there’s of course the fact that the vast majority of Wikipedia pages can be edited by anyone at any time, can be subject to vandalism or just a work in progress. Wikipedia should never be considered a definitive source.
Of course Wikipedia shouldn’t be treated as a definitive source, but this is true for most academic books actually. I’m tired right now but I don’t think there would be science as we know it if academic books were 100% factually correct; not only is reality nearly unexhaustable, at least in humanities, but the factuality of acclaimed research is constantly refuted, as has Norbert Elias’ research, which has influenced Bourdieu, and then Darmon, who has recently published a book suggesting improvements in the medical management of post-stroke recovery (whose research is questioned again by Wilfried Ligner), and Lahire, working on conditions to the success of underprivileged people, e.g. coming from illiterate families (whose research is especially questioned by a sinister muppet that nobody, to my understanding, takes seriously – I couldn’t read his book past its introduction).
Some sources are more solid than others and I guess it depends on the complexity of your tasks, but calling Wikipedia an unreliable source of information sounds like, if not a lie, cherry-picking to digress on a totally irrelevant topic. This isn’t what Diversity & respect’s comment was about; even if you considered that their account for their feelings as a contributor to our digital commons would contain enough red flags to question the factuality or quality of their contributions (assuming that writing, documenting, reporting, and sourcing couldn’t be learned from experience, which is factually wrong in itself), it’s hard to see how it would be a good contribution to the topic at hand, especially given its harshness and thus its rejection of a rather long, structured, novel, and documented comment, without even considering the culture it would be developing or how it could deter bystanders from contributing to e.g. free software (which is an actual problem here, to which, I will repeat, Diversity & respect is trying to provide a solution).
In sane doocratic communities based on self-help, that I’m part of (e.g. tildes), the person in question would have the space and opportunity to think about their behavior and apologize a few hours later; H Ent’s comment was unnecessarily harsh and factually incorrect in itself, so we all have our bad days but we shouldn’t lose focus of our real-life goals for the sake of an online conversation to the point of defending bad behavior.
The complete sentence meant that Diversity & respect would only feel at home at Wikipedia because he would be bathing in his peers’ mediocrity. This is no acceptable behavior.
my DDE experience was rather harsh since it’s just a beautiful vase for me, just like Gnome, resource-heavy as hell. I’d rather use Xfce if for balance, or KDE Plasma if for good-looking.
anyway, my go-to DE is like, Xfce>Openbox, Fluxbox>MATE>IceWM>LXQT>LXDE>Cinnamon>Budgie>KDE Plasma>Enlightenment. love them all in fact.
Linux friends,
You spur my comments even though I generally avoid forums; due to banning. You tube and facebook, twitter etc… are dead to me. The Internet has gone down. Not going; digressed. Lost.
Some truths do not return void; so without knowing to whom I’m typing, if to any group then this will be both a waste and a hopeful difference.
In the topic of DE’s and points mentioned; I preference Mate, usually. And without the elimination of all others, BTW. Mate scales better, uses less memory and is more familiar to new adopters. Mate keeps with stability well; by in large and has robust matching components. Plus like people are trained on Windows familiar, I am on Mate. “WIndows” is so awkward to me, and annoying. I forget how much until I attempt to use windows. Mate is easy to get used to. Oh and on Mate; I like how once a setting is checked then there’s no OK to also click.
But I’m motivated by the the overstatement about ‘all is opinion’. No it’s not. Some have well commented on effects. But no one has discussed truth. Likely as it’s obvious most think truth is opinion.. Well they may say, that’s your opinion of the truth. Truth is not subject to our opinions. Reverse that.
As I was trying to stretch as much life out of a then 10 year-old, 3 GB laptop, I found OpenBox with the Tint2 launcher perfectly usable, while costing the least in terms of RAM and CPU.
After I finally broke down and bought a more capable machine, KDE Plasma all the way.
I feel too handcuffed by the GNOME paradigm.
thanks
I’m glad to see my favorite DE (MATE) at least getting 3rd place. My next favorite DE is Xfce [surely it deserves much better than 6th place].
I have tried K Plasma (Kubuntu) and although it was good, it seemed a bit bloated to my liking. Right now, I’m back to Gnome 3.0. I am interested in others though…