Choosing a Desktop Environment

What is a Desktop Environment

If you’re coming from the Windows or Mac/OSX world you’re familiar with desktop environment. You probably haven’t ever thought about it beyond setting a background image or wallpaper, or rearranging your application icons in a funny pattern. The graphical desktop has been around for a very long time, and at this point it’s one of the fundamental pieces of using a computer.

With both Windows and OSX you don’t really get much of a choice when it comes to which Desktop Environment you get. In Windows you get the start menu button in the bottom left corner of the screen, the bar on the bottom of the screen where all of your open applications live, a nifty little recycle icon on the desktop etc. The Windows desktop environment is more than just that though.

You may be familiar with using the Command Prompt to do some things, or PowerShell even. You get the same Image viewer, task manager, and lots of other tools that might not seem to be part of the “desktop”, they are part of the basic “Windows Experience” that millions of people have become familiar with over the last 30 years or so.

The Desktop Environment (DE for short) comes with all kinds of little things that make using a computer easier. They’ll typically include at least (but not limited too):

A Terminal
A wallpaper setting tool
An image viewer
A graphical file manager
Customization Options
Panel
Session manager

Some DEs include tools to connect with your Android phone, or music players, email clients, and the list can go on and on and on…..

This may all seem pretty obvious, but it’s not something people tend to think about. It’s something important to keep in mind when preparing to install a Linux distro on your machine, and even more important to think about when distro hopping.¹ Frequently I see new Linux users trying to compare one distro to another, but really what they’re comparing is a feature of one DE to another.

Comparing Desktop Environments

The DE is essentially the one thing you will interact with when it comes to you actually using your computer. It will control how you open applications, what your desktop looks like, where the buttons are, how the system notifies you about things, in short: The DE controls how you interact with your computer.

I’ve heard a couple of the more well-known Linux YouTube personalities offer the opinion that which distro you choose is essentially irrelevant and that it’s more important to pick a DE that you like, and that works for you. I would almost completely agree with that, and for someone just dipping their toes in the vast ocean that is Linux, I’d say picking the DE is substantially more important than which distro someone uses.

With that in mind I’ll share some of my thoughts on some of the more popular DEs, and try to make some basic comparisons about them. Ultimately choosing the “right” DE is up to you, but hopefully I can provide some info to help you determine which DE might be the best for you.

As with all things Linuxy, there is not really a single right answer, and the choice doesn’t have to be permanent. You can try multiple DEs and find the one that works best for you. There are plenty of other options beyond the four I’ve listed below, I encourage you to do your own research, and while I’ve included videos for each of them, check out the individual project websites, the information below is really just intended to be a starting point.

Gnome

Lets start with the Elephant in the Linux user space. Gnome is extraordinarily popular, it’s the default DE for several major Distros (Ubuntu and Fedora among others). It’s fully fleshed out and offers what many would consider a fantastic user experience.

Gnome has a very unique look, and provides some truly fantastic tools for getting things done. It integrates well with cloud services like Google providing a seamless experience for end users.

This is a 5 minute walkthrough of the latest version of Gnome (at the time of this writing Gnome 3)

For more information check out the project’s webpage: Gnome.org

KDE

KDE is another very popular, well-built, fully featured DE. The project has been around for quite some time, and they’ve one of the best looking DEs out there. The Plasma desktop is truly good looking, and offers a ton of customization options, and lots of really cool features. They offer a giant list of applications that integrate tightly with the DE, offering a really good user experience.

One of the more interesting features KDE offers is the KDE connect feature which allows integration between an Android phone and the computer.

A quick tour of the latest version from KDE:

As always check out the project website for more information

Cinnamon

Cinnamon is kind of an outlier in this list. It is one of the few DEs that doesn’t have a dedicated project (it’s built and maintained by the Linux Mint team), it is available for most distros. In my opinion, one of the best things about Cinnamon, is that it feels a lot like Windows. It makes transitioning to Linux a bit easier for those who aren’t looking for something wildly different. I actually used Cinnamon and Linux Mint for quite sometime, and found very few negative things to whine about, it was a very solid option, and is still something I recommend for many people.

Have another 5 minute video tour:

For more information about Linux Mint and Cinnamon click here

XFCE

The XFCE project prides itself on making a lightweight DE, that is still fully featured. All of the basic important things are there. Admittedly, it’s not the best looking DE when it’s installed, but it is incredibly customizable, and with some tweaking it can look very good.

Another quick video:

The XFCE project actually has very nice tour of version 4.14 here

Other Options

Fully packaged desktop environments are probably the most commonly used options, but there are other options:

No Desktop at all. Interacting with the machine only through a terminal interface is very common with servers.
Window managers. These are tools that provide a method for having graphical displays running, but do not function as a full desktop environment. This can provide more control over the user experience, but takes a bit more configuration than a typical DE. I will cover some of the window manager options and configuration in another post.