Spent lots of time with Gnome 2.
In Dec 2024 I got hooked in Hyprland on Arch and have a cool rice for it. But I’ve tried KDE on desktop now with Parrot OS since Plasma is popular. Still need to find some cool dot files or rice it myself.
I’ve noticed SwayFX getting lots of love lately. I might use that as an option with Plasma but am afraid of conflicts. I’m excited about it since Linux has now officially replaced windows on my gaming rig, which is the very last MS computer left in my house.
I have KDE Plasma, Hyprland, and Mango (WM) installed.
Of the three, I use Mango most of the time, and KDE Plasma sometimes. Hyprland, I’ve kept because most of my config was for it, and I’m still currently porting them to Mango. Most of the dotfiles are in their own areas, though I’ve mostly piggybacked on Plasma components. One area that I’ve got some trouble with is program theming. KDE Plasma has its own, Qt has its own (which is different from the KDE Plasma one), and GTK is yet another. I’ve decided that the best way to deal with it is to make them look as similar as I can, so that whether I’m on Mango, Hyprland, or KDE Plasma, my programs will look the same–except for the presence of window titlebars, which Mango doesn’t show, Hyprland shows via a plugin, but KDE Plasma does show.
I used Ubuntu’s implementation of Gnome back when I started dabbling with Linux some time ago. I didn’t bother theming it. And then I moved to XFCE when that underpowered machine I was using couldn’t handle Ubuntu’s Gnome without feeling like it’s swimming in molasses. XFCE is nice and configurable in contrast, and I didn’t have much to complain about. However, I found its configuration back then to be quite troublesome, especially as I tried tweaking my own bars and panels.
I then moved to KDE Plasma when I got my current machine. It was pretty okay out of the box, but coming from a tweaked XFCE, I couldn’t stop myself from theming it to my liking. Hyprland was introduced to me mid-2024, and I was thrust head-first into configuring it from scratch, no dotfiles to copy from, or pre-made shells to make my experience easier.
At present, Mango won me over by having a decent vertical scrolling layout, as well as the flexibilty of using other layouts on the fly. While I like Hyprland’s level of polish and customizability, and recently have implemented scrolling (both vertical and horizontal), I am staying with Mango if only because I’ve already done the work porting most of my stuff there.