- Natively supports fractional scaling REALLY WELL!
- Memory optimized!
- Nice desktop defaults: alt-tab only in same space, window snapping (specially good!), good compositing
- Clipboard history manager out-of-the-box!
- Modern looking (breeze), easy to dark everything if wanted.
- Nice retro theming with MS Windows 9x application style, plastik window decoration and oxygen cold colors.
- Really complete & centralized system settings
- App store (discovery) works really well
- Very easy to configure key bindings & swap ctrl-caps in one central place
- Very nice (and well sized for every scaling) bottom panel
- Plasma widgets and KWin rocks! Everything is quite snappy
- Dolphin is the most awesome file manager
- Very good desktop applications (VLC, Okular, Kate)
- Touchpad with natural scrolling, mouse normal scrolling
- No plastik window decorations available for GTK applications (Firefox, Tilix)
- Too much configurable. Why would I need activities?
- I feel breeze icons dumb 🙄
- Some KDE programs glitches background with lines when scaling at 1.5x (seen at Konsole and Kate)
- Missing emoji global input
- Don't like the task manager panel too much...
- I don't like the look of the bottom panel/menu, it's too "liny"
- No screen tilt support
- Extremely lightweight, snapy and simple
- Very nince and simple panel (power-manager, wifi, bluetooth, notifications, clock+calendar)
- Nice panel profiles, easy to backup (using "xubuntu 18.10" at bottom with workspace switcher)
- Good and simple central settings manager
- Applications autostart is easy to configure (but doesn't seem to always work, at least for swap caps)
- Software store is great
- Good integration with GTK, firefox looks nice, at least 👍
- Only x2 scale 😡
- Meta key doesn't open the whisker menu by default 🤦♂️
- Have to set caps-lock as ctrl with
/usr/bin/setxkbmap -option "ctrl:nocaps"and add it in autostart - Clipman doesn't come by default
- side note: but when packages xfce4-clipman and xfce4-clipman-plugin are installed, it automatically adds to the panel and works very nicely!
- Lack of good video, PDF and text apps
- Alt-tab compositor is VERY poor
- System doesn't signal QT applications to scale scale at 2x.
- No window snapping
- Only the default window manager theme works OK with 2x scaling.
- Terrible window manager defaults
- Stick to any side moves window to another workspace instead of tiling, wtf? 🤷♂️
- Super-D and Super-Up/Down/Left/Right doesn't work as intended (fixed arrow window snap after, at least)
- Spotify took years to install by the software store (snap issue?)
- No screen tilt support
After trying this proposed solution with 144dpi, increasing the panel to 42px and re-login, everything looked decent at my QHD monitor. The window decorations feels a bit odd but I think that I can live with that...
edit: Screw that! Found "Select a window scaling factor" at MATE Tweaks tool. Setting to HiDPI works half way 😞
- Different & cool desktop layouts. Using redmond, netbook is very nice too.
- Good old, feels like vanilla Gnome 2 experience
- The best default alt-tab compositor of all
- Window snapping by default (a bit "too hard" btw)
- Software boutique is the best in class, I think.
- Easy and simple configuration: window management, touchpad + mouse, keyboard shortcuts
- Nicest audio control. Volume beeps, interface & cool panel applet with media buttons.
- Spotify snap (guess) doesn't have the cursor theme issue.
- UI theme looks dated/dummy. Missing nice and modern options 🤔
- Have to install diodon to have clipboard manager, and must re-login.
- Screen brightness resets on every new session 🔆
- Have to change caps-lock "manually" with
setxkbmap -option "ctrl:nocaps" - Control center (system settings) is a bit messy
- Inconsistent/dummy icons
- No screen tilt support
- Insanely good defaults
- touchpad natural scrolling, normal mouse scrolling
- Easy to use x2 scaling
- Common gnome2 keybindings
- Best workspaces management ever: keybindings, add/remove, switch, move window, overview
- Firefox default search is Yahoo though 😒
- Great touch screen support (as good as gnome3)
- Screen tilt supported!
- Excelent window snapping and tiling
- Almost perfect alt-tab compositor
- Great central system settings
- The most intuitive and organized of all!
- Very easy to set caps-lock as ctrl
- Simple and modern theme + icons out-of-the-box
- With quite a lot of options and colors
- Quite good default applications pre-installed
- Beautiful login greeter (simmilar to MATE)
- Nemo (file manager) can open windows as root user
- Workspace swap flickers some windows (intermitent)
- Older kernel (5.0 rather than 5.3)
- No fractional scaling
- Lack of automatic virtual keyboard for tablet mode (only gnome3 scores on this)
- Super+L opens "Melange" by default 🤔
- Trying to install the telegram flatpak from software store, downloaded too many things (including kde packages) that filled up my entire root partition
| DE | RAM(Mi) |
|---|---|
| KDE | 488 |
| XFCE | 460 |
| MATE | 519 |
| Cinnamon | 510 |
KDE Screenshots
scaling 1x:
scaling 1.3x:
scaling 1.5x:
scaling 1.8x:
scaling 2x:
