these blog posts are always just the repeating well-known comparision talking points (xfce: light, other: not). just like hundred other blogs.
Are live boot screenshots and RAM usage all there is about these DEs?
i would say the target reader is people who haven’t read all the other hundred other blogs
Well, other differences usually go very deep into the details and are ultimately a matter of taste. It’s certainly not the case that all of these have a unique selling point, because well, they’re not products trying to sell themselves.
Having said that, these are the high-level differences as I see them:
Cinnamon:
- Very Windows-like (aesthetics and keyboard shortcuts)
- one polished workflow
- covers relatively many exotic usage scenarios relatively well
MATE:
- relatively lightweight
- one polished workflow
Xfce:
- relatively lightweight
- very modular and customizable
I wonder why they don’t have a LXDE flavor. I used ~2006 era core2duos with some gma950 and 2 gb of ram until a few years ago. The performance of Lubuntu was unparalleled.
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I honestly can’t use anything else.
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I got tired of the broken theming experience and lack of wayland support any time soon on their roadmap.
I also found myself preferring apps that were built for GNOME anyway, so I ended up making a silly XFCE GNOME hybrid. All of my computers have decent graphics/ram and the resource usage of GNOME is overstated.
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XFCE Window Manager & GTK themes are different
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Also I don’t think it will be 20 years before Wayland is usable. I am using it right now on Manjaro Gnome and it works better than X.
I don’t like any DE. IMHO, DEs go against the KISS principle.
I was a Gnome 2 user back in the day and then used KDE for a while. After some Linux-Desktop-Pause I installed Mint and used Cinnamon for a couple of yrs, so I’ve tested thru the bank. As I switched back to my beloved Debian I tried out the Gnome 3 UI in Buster for the first time. I find the Gnome 3 UI actually refreshing and different. I figured out that I was, after yrs of Linux usage, still trying to think of Linux Desktop in a way that it should be “Windows-like” in appearance. No need for that! People over at Gnome are trying new stuff and this is good! Cinnamon is a great DE, but Gnome 3 doesn’t deserve the bashing it gets.
GNOME