Which DE would be best?

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I’m a Linux beginner. I’ve heard that NixOS has a good reputation, and I’d like to install it. Which DE would you recommend?

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Oh boy, you’ll get opinions in this thread :slight_smile:

I like COSMIC because it’s reliable on Wayland and one of the only Wayland DEs I’ve seen other than Sway that works after being cross compiled. It’s also easy to theme and requires little configuration to get working.

I like Plasma because it was the first DE I’ve tried that was reliable on NVIDIA for me. Now I mostly use COSMIC because it’s a bit lighter weight.

I used to use enlightenment a lot because it was pretty simple to get working.

FWIW, you can try several of them on NixOS with config rebuilds and pick which you like best.

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Do you like writing code for fun, and do you have time and energy to learn two complex things at once?

Anyway, just about any DE or even not-using a DE is fine, you have to decide what works best for your workflow by trial and error.

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The big 2:

  1. KDE plasma: works well, highly flexible
  2. GNOME: works well, a bit more polished

I’d recommend watching some YouTube video and choosing the one you like most. Both are gonna work well in nixos.

There are more options, but I’d recommend exploring them when you get a bit more familiar with Linux, as there won’t be as much information around as the big 2.

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GNOME is very beginner friendly

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XFCE because they don’t keep changing it. Especially not GNOME because they change it all the fricking time (although I agree that it’s very beginner-friendly).

XFCE is a bit ugly by default but it’s easy to configure.

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Cinnamon (what Linux Mint uses) is perfectly cromulent (would suggest avoiding Wayland though). Cosmic if you want something a bit spiffier.

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I like to use GNOME because you can declaratively configure everything through the dconf NixOS module.

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Not wrong, but I wouldn’t call that a beginner-friendly interface, and it is prone to causing breakages in some cases.

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My not-super-technical partner prefers KDE Plasma. I prefer tiling WMs, but they aren’t for beginners. Neither of us like GNOME for the DE.

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Thank you everyone! It was very helpful. I’ll consider cinnamon and KDE PLASMA!

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I have time, so I’ll try some trial and error.

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Startx+i3 this way you can contribute in a wm agnostic way (and hopefully get kontact to work)

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I don’t think it’s a Linux beginner’s job to fix your setup :wink:

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I think it’s worth learning how to roll your own DE. It might seem intimidating, but if you take it one piece at a time, it’s very doable. Having done it on a few other distros, I think that NixOS is especially suited to rolling your own DE because it’s so easy to keep track of what you’re doing and to undo things that don’t work (definitely use version control for your system configs). There are also tons of guides for how to do just about anything you can think of online (the Arch Wiki is often super useful). I’m also a non-technical person in the sense that most of the programming I do is either Nix-related or for various parts of my DE, so trust me when I say if I can do it, you can too!

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If you are coming from windows, KDE plasma is incredibly similar and not only that, has built in widgeting system, and is incredibly customizable with modules like plasma manager.

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Some snobs were not happy with startx+i3. So I’ve joined the cool club to make a new recommendation, 3 orders of magnitude better


. ~/.X/xprofile   
while true                                                     
do         
    zenity --question --text "WM?" --ok-label "i3" --cancel-label "xmonad" && i3 || xmonad
done

You’ll need some for statements in i3 and doShift in xmonad but this is the best desktop experience on earth, second only to Windows 7 with jumplists.

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My 2¢ on DEs/WMs:
Either COSMIC or Niri+DMS(+Vicinae for a nicer launcher) would be my pick. Take the COSMIC rec with a grain of salt since I have not actually used it much (sometimes accidentally or intentionally went in as I am on Pop!_OS+Nix).
I use Niri+my custom YAWSF shell+Vicinae personally, but if I did not make a custom shell then I would probably be using DMS (especially since my custom shell was to switch off of Noctalia V4).

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i was on niri (hyprland before that) for some time but recently switched to mango https://mangowm.github.io

you can configure the scroller layout to behave exactly like niri and dwindle layout to be exactly like hyprland

it also have like 10+ other layouts you can switch live from keybind or ipc…