Gnome, KDE, XFCE… which is most simple and customizable

desktop-environmentsoftware-recwindow-manager

This'll be my first Linux install, so I've never had to choose between a desktop environment (I come from OS X) — forgive me if I'm not fully literate on where exactly the OS ends and the desktop manager begins.

My needs are:

  • Customizability (I like my work environment to look and function a particular way) — especially being able to move and organise windows using keyboard commands and shortcuts.

  • Simplicity: I like as little real estate to be taken up by graphical widgets and toolbars as possible (as I said, I tend to avoid the mouse). If it were up to me, windows would just show content, not even a scrollbar.

  • Performance: I hear Gnome can be slow and bloated. Is this the case?

I will be using the environment as an IDE. I was going to go with Arch at first, but not having that much time on my hands, it looked pretty daunting. Fedora looks like a good choice too.

  • Side question: just how much does one's choice of windows manager affect
    which applications one can run?

Best Answer

I know how you feel; I tried so many different distros before getting a feel for the differences, and I continue to try new ones, usually in a virtual machine or a spare partition.

I don't really find Gnome to be slow and bloated, but I'm not too happy with the direction it's gone recently with the Gnome 3 shell. Gnome is fairly simple compared to KDE, but not nearly as customizable, and it's getting less customizable, it seems.

I find KDE to be overkill, and I've never spent enough time to feel comfortable with it. It has lots of options, widgets, etc, and of course, some people love it for that. KDE may also have the most variety of (native) apps available, but I haven't used it enough to really know.

From your post, i think you should look at XFCE. It's the least bloated of the mostly full-featured environments, without a lot of extras. It will run most of the same things that Gnome runs, as it uses the same GTK toolkit, I think.

However, it's possible to run KDE apps using Gnome, etc, buy you need to also install whatever supporting libraries, etc are required for them. A lot of people don't like to do this, but if you have plenty of disk space, it's probably fine.

Being new, I'd recommend sticking to a mainstream distro like Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, etc, as 3rd party software is more likely to have an easy install for their programs.

I should add that this is all a matter of opinion more than anything else, unless you add some more criteria that might differentiate the differences more.

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