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For Linux users, what is your favorite Desktop environment, and Distro?

Multicore said:
A term emulator.

Desktop environments aren't minimalist.
Click to expand...
Agreed, which is why I have been using PuTTY to access to my Debian (for general use) and FreeBSD (for zfs NAS) headless servers over the past decades. And even the choice of those just those two unix distributions (and never Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.) also says a lot about my approach :cool:.

But I am intrigued by this thread since I've been interested in jumping to a windowing-style interface. (But... which one?) I give
@Brian Hall's response a lot of weight based on his background.
 
Raitsa said:
I would say test https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri or https://hypr.land/
Click to expand...
I have zero clue what a Wayland compositor is, why I would want it, or how I would use it. (But I will be sure to not confuse with with an Xorg windows manager.)

From the website, the total description of this product is the following:
A Wayland compositor is a fully autonomous Display Server, like Xorg itself. It is not possible to mix’n’match Wayland compositors like you could on Xorg with window managers and compositors. It is also not entirely possible, nor recommended, to try and use all Xorg applications on Wayland. See this page for a list of recommended Wayland native/compatible programs.

Wayland compositors should not be confused with Xorg window managers
Click to expand...
 
Multicore said:
Windows and Macos are both good. Pos and cons either way. Windows has WSL. Apple has better chips.
Click to expand...
Thanks, and understood; but missing the point for me. I'm aware of the WSL option with Windows and also macOS's BSD-based journey... including the cool tidbit that macOS is one of few officially licensed Unix versions.

But in this case, I am interested in a potential windowed-based interface as an alternative to PuTTY (shell, emacs) for my headless home servers — all of which are virtual machines running on a hypervisor server that is separate from my primary laptop. And while I am currently primarily using Debian (headless), I'm not adverse to moving to a different Linux-based platform with long-term stable release cycles.
 
rcstevensonaz said:
I have zero clue what a Wayland compositor is, why I would want it, or how I would use it. (But I will be sure to not confuse with with an Xorg windows manager.)
Click to expand...
It gets defined here, not that you necessarily want to know: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/

A Wayland Compositor is doing the rendering for the desktop environment, compositing referring (I think) to the rasterisation/scaling/transformation of whatever images are going to be displayed, but also providing common interface stuff e.g. the funky effect you might see when you minimise a window. You have to have one to run a Wayland-compatible desktop environment, or you can stay old school with X11-type window managers and an X11 server such as you used to get in any of the distros of old.

In practice, the big bundlers like Gnome and KDE are already implementing Wayland backends and you get one by default. If you shy away from their bloat and visual style, then you might apt-get hyprland or something else so you get the tiled windows and cool shizzle without gcalc, a "start menu", or Ubuntu One and other widgets/prompts/annoyances. It would be just you, your xterm and the ability to drag windows around. For an easier life, you'd be better off picking a clean theme for one of the bigger integrators I expect.
 
rcstevensonaz said:
Thanks, and understood; but missing the point for me. I'm aware of the WSL option with Windows and also macOS's BSD-based journey... including the cool tidbit that macOS is one of few officially licensed Unix versions.
Click to expand...
OSX was a little bit FreeBSDish decades ago. A few of us were excited about that at the time. I bought a Ti PowerBook because I could have shells, real MS Office, and Mathematica on the same screen. I remember Scott Bradner expressing similar sentiment. But Apple had no interest in Unix (why should they?) and went their own way and I lost any interest in running anything on a Mac that wasn't made for Mac. I transitioned all our server stuff to Linux in the same era as FreeBSD was clearly on the way down.

I recently hypothesized that part of the impetus that has driven Docker to where it is today is: Macbooks. Apple has the best hardware for laptops and people need laptops while Docker permits arbitrary divergence of Macos from server conventions.

rcstevensonaz said:
But in this case, I am interested in a potential windowed-based interface as an alternative to PuTTY (shell, emacs) for my headless home servers
Click to expand...
To do what?

It seems to me that client-server obviates the need for running windows desktop environments on Linux. E.g. I no longer run local development VMs, my development servers are in another country and my IDE is almost indistinguishable connected to them as it is running on the local Windows machine. Combine that with how the Windows shell is fine for lots of tasks (ok, scripting in PowerShell is WAF but I can get by without doing that much of it) I seldom need WSL.
 
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Multicore said:
OSX was a little bit FreeBSDish decades ago. A few of us were excited about that at the time. I bought a Ti PowerBook because I could have shells, real MS Office, and Mathematica on the same screen. I remember Scott Bradner expressing similar sentiment. But Apple had no interest in Unix (why should they?) and went their own way and I lost any interest in running anything on a Mac that wasn't made for Mac. I transitioned all our server stuff to Linux in the same era as FreeBSD was clearly on the way down.

I recently hypothesized that part of the impetus that has driven Docker to where it is today is: Macbooks. Apple has the best hardware for laptops and people need laptops while Docker permits arbitrary divergence of Macos from server conventions.
Click to expand...
I agree. While I have fliped back and forth, I use Windows or macOS as my day-to-day machine for the same reasons. Those are the operating systems that the software I use is designed to run under.

And similar, I use Linix-based virtual machines (Debian, FreeBSD) for services that are designed to run there. E.g., Lyrion Music Server, XigmaNAS, Unifi controller, FreeSWITCH, Kamalio, services/bind for routing between VLANs, etc. Also, my scripts for testing, burn-in, and wiping hard drivers are run on FreeBSD (since that is the platform I also use for zfs NAS).

Multicore said:
To do what?

It seems to me that client-server obviates the need for running windows desktop environments on Linux. E.g. I no longer run local development VMs, my development servers are in another country and my IDE is almost indistinguishable connected to them as it is running on the local Windows machine. ...
Click to expand...
That is an interesting observation — perhaps an IDE with remote access is sufficient.

What I've found is that I miss having multiple "windows" so that I can easily edit files in one window, run shell scripts and debug in another terminal window, and then monitor log files and status from yet other windows. Doing that within the context of a single PuTTY window running bash is very limiting (though I could also open multiple PuTTY windows as a solution). And to be fair, I am only doing very simplistic scripting stuff, so PuTTY has worked fine for what I need.
 
nerdstrike said:
It gets defined here, not that you necessarily want to know: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/

A Wayland Compositor is doing the rendering for the desktop environment, compositing referring (I think) to the rasterisation/scaling/transformation of whatever images are going to be displayed, but also providing common interface stuff e.g. the funky effect you might see when you minimise a window. You have to have one to run a Wayland-compatible desktop environment, or you can stay old school with X11-type window managers and an X11 server such as you used to get in any of the distros of old.

In practice, the big bundlers like Gnome and KDE are already implementing Wayland backends and you get one by default. If you shy away from their bloat and visual style, then you might apt-get hyprland or something else so you get the tiled windows and cool shizzle without gcalc, a "start menu", or Ubuntu One and other widgets/prompts/annoyances. It would be just you, your xterm and the ability to drag windows around. For an easier life, you'd be better off picking a clean theme for one of the bigger integrators I expect.
Click to expand...
Thanks! A suggestion: you might want to add that link to the Hyper.land wiki page. And perhaps under FAQ, add the question "What is a Wayland Compositor" with that link for those of us who are clueless when we land there and don't even know what we are looking at.

And yes, I am interested since my VMs are all running headless. So the reference to X11 (which I recall from SunOS back in 1985) caught my attention.
 
rcstevensonaz said:
That is an interesting observation — perhaps an IDE with remote access is sufficient.

What I've found is that I miss having multiple "windows" so that I can easily edit files in one window, run shell scripts and debug in another terminal window, and then monitor log files and status from yet other windows. Doing that within the context of a single PuTTY window running bash is very limiting (though I could also open multiple PuTTY windows as a solution). And to be fair, I am only doing very simplistic scripting stuff, so PuTTY has worked fine for what I need.
Click to expand...
I'd suggest having a go with MS Visual Studio Code. The problem with anything like that is the rather big learning curve. But you may enjoy the flexible multi-term stuff.

It's been years since I used PuTTY, thank goodness. Never liked it. Maybe it's better now. Years ago on the Mac I liked iTerm2 which had the awesome and terrifying feature of broadcasting keyboard to multiple terms. That's one way to manage a server cluster!
 
Multicore said:
I'd suggest having a go with MS Visual Studio Code. The problem with anything like that is the rather big learning curve. But you may enjoy the flexible multi-term stuff.

It's been years since I used PuTTY, thank goodness. Never liked it. Maybe it's better now. Years ago on the Mac I liked iTerm2 which had the awesome and terrifying feature of broadcasting keyboard to multiple terms. That's one way to manage a server cluster!
Click to expand...
Thanks! I recently downloaded Visual Studio Code for use on the macbook itself, so now I have added reason to invest in mastering it. (And no, PuTTY hasn't evolved... it is still just a raw terminal emulator and nothing more)

Turning this thread back over to the original conversation about Linux desktops and distros... thanks all for this side excursion on headless options.
 
I run Ubuntu 24 on a 10+ year old Lenovo X250. Super responsive, so I do not agree with those who claim it has "bloat". I also think it looks clean and functional. I know the Linux CLI very well, but after all these years there is *still* an occasional (but important) divide there between some key distributions I find a bit inexcusable. But oh well.

In any case, I don't want to use a bare-bones CLI interface outside of work hours, unless I absolutely have to... which with Desktop Linux distributions these days is really very seldom necessary.

Also love the ability to have my Smartphone screen show on the Linux computer and the ability to control it that way.

1760385052756.png
 
You can have your android phone on your screen w/ any linux using https://github.com/barry-ran/QtScrcpy

PS: Ubuntu KDE 22.04 and 24.04 user, other than on an atomic pi that uses my custom mashup of LxQt and KDE.
PPS: Been using Linux since RedHat 1.0 and or Slackware -- circa 1995.
PPPS: prior to that I had a DEC PDP 11/750 under my desk (kept me warm during winter -- especially illegally sleeping under my desk during school breaks) as a research assistant at Stanford EE/CS running BSD.
PPPPS: first got on the "internet" (nee ARPAnet) in 1982 via SAIL mainframe which had cool graphics terminals created out of a custom disk drive setup (spinning disk acted like video memory and you could conference in/share other people's displays onto your own)... http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/display/1-7.htm
PPPPS: audio related: https://community.linuxmint.com/software/view/mudita24
PPPPPS: coming soon ... TrainsPODder. ( https://rumble.com/v1n7cx8-trainspo...s-radio-w-good-proper-noun-spelling-infe.html )
 
Not to go too far off topic* but...
Is there any practical way to get a generic O/S (graphical Linux morph or... whatever) onto an arbitrary Android tablet?
I have an old Dell tablet that's 100% functional but almost 100% useless, since it is too old to support any 'modern' Android updates, so it's essentially impossible to install any s/w on it.
I would just like to use it with a browser to access my NAS -- stuff like that. Seems essentially impossible.
But one would think... ;)


______________
* me?

inconceivable-princessbride.gif
 
mhardy6647 said:
Not to go too far off topic* but...
Is there any practical way to get a generic O/S (graphical Linux morph or... whatever) onto an arbitrary Android tablet?
I have an old Dell tablet that's 100% functional but almost 100% useless, since it is too old to support any 'modern' Android updates, so it's essentially impossible to install any s/w on it.
I would just like to use it with a browser to access my NAS -- stuff like that. Seems essentially impossible.
But one would think... ;)


______________
* me?

View attachment 482795
Click to expand...

Try LineageOS android.
 
mhardy6647 said:
Is there any practical way to get a generic O/S (graphical Linux morph or... whatever) onto an arbitrary Android tablet?
Click to expand...
It depends very much on the device, as the OS needs to support the device with all drivers necessary and the way it boots. On standard Android you have Fastboot as the bootlader and if the bootloader is unlocked (unlikely but might be unlockable depending on vendor) you can use this to flash other ROMs.
Generally unless you luck out and somebody already made something specifically for your device, the risk of bricking it is very high.

Android devices are not as flexible as classic x86 hardware.
 
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