I know Gnome is the default on popular distros: Fedora, Ubuntu, Rhel, Pop OS (it’s Cosmic Desktop yes but it is still based on Gnome)…etc. But Gnome just doesnt work for me. I would pick XFCE - stable and no BS.
Before Manjaro and their cetificate shenanigan, I used to use their XFCE version. At the time, it was marketed as the “Flagship Manjaro version”. I went 4 years without any problems and I did tinker a lot, just couldnt get their XFCE to break.
After a tough Arch or Gentoo installs, I just want to put XFCE on and call it a day.
What about you guys?
I don’t mind a little “change” every now and then, but still – “Sway” on my “potatoes” (Orange pi zero 3 and Orange pi 5 max) and “Hyprland” on my x86_64 PC.
My daily driver is Arch running sway. Would be hard to go back from the simplicity and elegance.
Isn’t sway based on i3? i3 is a WM not a DE. But as sway is not X11, I’m not sure if it’s just a WM
Sway still primarily counts as a WM + Compositor, but considering it has keymaps, autostart, and libinput config mechanisms embedded in it, I would say it borders a desktop environment.