I've been enjoying Gnome using !pop_os@lemmy.ml. It's not perfect, but good enough. The preinstalled tiling extension also makes using a full DE bearable without spending hours customizing a WM.
I'm looking forward to trying out Cosmic, which I have high hopes for.
Distro doesn't really matter nowadays. You can get all desktop environments to work on most distros. Especially the big players like KDE, Gnome, Xfce have hundred distros they are shipped with by default. Most big distros have versions for each of the most popular desktop environments. Therefore, I would suggest that you look for the distro which fits your needs best and then install the desktop environment you want to work with afterwards, if there isn't a flavor of your distro that ships with it already.
GNOME with Dash to Panel is my favorite GUI, but I've been warming up to KDE since their Wayland VRR implementation is complete and working while GNOME keeps waffling over something as stupid as "omg what if we have to show a VRR toggle in the settings??? our users will be CONFUSED!!!!". While GNOME is very smooth and functional with extensions, this stupid limited mindset of the core developers prevents it from being a good choice for gaming. Mutter-VRR fixes it and actually works very well, but they keep breaking it with updates.
Pop yea? Yeah?!
I'm not aware of any distro that ships this by default yet, but Hyprland is my favorite visually so far. Excited for it to continue to develop. I'm sticking with Sway for now, Hyperland's grouping isn't nearly as extensive as Sway's tabbing and stacking, hopefully that will come eventually, but Hyprland sure does look amazing.
I'm more of a window manager person myself (Qtile to be precise), and I imagine that's not really what you're looking for here, but DE-wise from what I've tried I like KDE and XFCE the most
I've been preferring KDE lately tbh. Very flexible and familiar. Still don't know what that activity thing is for though lol
Yeah, this may not be helpful for you but the best GUI is a tiling window manager (compositor?). Using it for 2.5 years, never looked back. I really recommend Hyprland for everyone to try, it's the perfect thing we've ever needed.
I recently started using KDE with i3 as the window manager - I've long been looking for a full-fleged DE with good window tiling, and KDE + i3 does that so well and is so easy to set up it's like they were made to work together. So I just use Kubuntu and add i3 on top of that, easy peazy
Fedora or OpenSUSE with Gnome. Stable, GUI friendly, and simple.
I think i3 looks really pretty
I've been using i3 for the past 8 years or so, and can wholeheartedly recommend it (or it's cousin Sway if you're in Wayland-land) if you're into tiling window managers (there are dozens of us!). I find them invaluable for their keyboard-centric operation, and also massively sweet on ultrawide monitors. Light on resources and minimalistic too.
As far as distributions go, I've been on Arch for the past several years. I think there are some (unofficial) spins for most Linux flavours with i3 out-of-the-box.
I used XFCE for a long long time before I went to tiles, which is a decent more traditional Window Manager, with a more lean focus than some of the others. Fairly customizable. I still use some of the system apps from there from old habit.
I wouldn't get too tied up into what window manager is default in any given distribution. At least for me, part of the joy is finding a combination of software (including the desktop environment/Window Manager) that works for you specifically. And there are plenty of live CDs (or usb images now I guess) with various WMs that can be used to take things out for a spin without commiting to installing it. :) Here are various Ubuntu flavors for instance.
Fedora. It ships vanilla GNOME which is just a very pleasant experience. Vanilla GNOME is just something else man.
Kubuntu or KDE Neon 100%
Ultimately they both use the KDE Plasma desktop environment, which is the only DE I've ever seen that has a proper modern look by default (others IMO look like either the 2000's or an OS 4 Kidz), as well as being pretty featurful for multi monitor productivity
Arch+KDE Plasma is what I personally am gonna switch to this summer
Check out KDE Debian spin too. I booted the live iso to check some stuff and was seriously impressed. Gave me the early ubuntu 10-11 vibe where the OS just stays out of your way.
Opensuse because of Yast; Yast does not have the best UI, but for some settings it's the only option if you don't want to use terminal.
For me, it's Fedora + KDE when I need a GUI. I used to be an AwesomeWM guy for a very long time but I needed a proper GUI for my 5 year old. I'll convert her to i3 or Awesome one day....
If you’re interested - XFCE has many keyboard shortcuts to achieve tiling-like behavior. Might be a good compromise.
I am into KDE Plasma, it works quite well on my distro (Fedora by the way) and one thing that I like about is is that I can make it truly mine. Defaults are nice, however sometimes I think I don't need that or need something else, and quite often I manage to do it to be the most comfortable for me. It's also very customisable and with enough learning you could rice it into quite a lot of stuff, even though I myself don't really know a lot how people do it.
I probably switch what I'm using every few months. The thing I cannot live without though is tiling support, whether just inherent to the window manager I'm using or an extension, I find it painful to use a computer for anything serious without one now.
Currently using KDE with the Bismuth extension (Fedora Kinoite) which isn't perfect but not bad. I'm eyeing Hyprland up from afar but as an Nvidia user I have too many issues on Wayland at the moment.
Honestly Opensuse with gnome or kde is really amazing!
All of them. Every distro can run any desktop, so all of them.
I'm an arch kde user, but I gotta say Elementary / pantheon is / was incredibly beautiful. They took a lot of the simplistic design principles from iOS, and made something even prettier.
Probably any distro that ships KDE Plasma 5 as default - I'm stuck with GNOME for now as I need to use Evolution for work (EWS mail accounts), but if I had the choice I'd probably be on Plasma.
Currently I am using Cinnamon with Debian and quite like it. Previouly I enjoyed XFCE, espacially on slower laptops. Never really liked GNOME or KDE Plasma though. GNOME has too many animations and feels slow. At the same time its not very customizable. KDE on the other hand feels slow as well and though it is kind of fancy it seems not to be my taste and I did not like the way you customize either. That is not so important to me anymore. So please don't read from this that Cinnamon or XFCE would be great for customization. I would not know it.
I use cinnamon on capable pcs with large screens but on anything weaker or anything with a smallish screen I use xfce.
Gnome 3 is OK and it doesn't interfere with gaming or fullscreen mode programs as hard, in fact it's superior to even cinnamon in this regard. It's frowned upon for high resource usage but the way it deals with fullscreen works really well as long as it doesn't crash for some other reason. I dont use Gnome because without extensions, it's a barely usable mess. VERY ESSENTIAL extentions like Window List or that one that makes the top bar work on multiple monitors take forever to get updated every time a new Gnome version comes out.
KDE Plasma seems to be a good choice. A lot of people seem to have good experiences with it. I'm not one of those people. First of all, that keyring bullshit alone is too much to deal with. I already type my login password once when I first boot up which is pushing my patience in the first place but KDE makes me ADDITIONALLY type in my keyring password in order for essential drivers and wifi to work? Fuck no. Also, that update nag screen is the absolute worst. It's almost worse than Windows fucking 10. It may not kick you off so it can update but it pops up at the worst possible time with impeccable timing. Just about every time I'm jacking off to some porn, right as I'm cumming the stupid fucking update screen pops up and I blow my load to the update screen. I don't know how KDE gets the timing just right but this happens too fucking often. These 2 issues already push it pretty far past usability for me but I'm not done. The 3rd pillar of KDE's shittiness is the file transfer window (or lack thereof). The only way to know the status of a file transfer is by looking at the window icon in the taskbar where the transfer progress bar is overlayed with about 0.00000000000000000000000000001% opacity. There is almost no difference between the "progress bar" color and the "no progress bar" color. That's just the major issues, there are others but I'm not writing a fuckin book about KDE.
Xfce is good. It'll run on anything without really sacrificing too many features. The biggest hit to it's usability is that the start menu doesn't have a search bar but if you're using like a pentium 1 or something this is a feature not a bug. There exist add-ons that add a search bar anyway. If you need something even more lightweight, use CDE, NSCDE or if you're really desperate to not waste cpu clock cycles, dwm. I had to use an Athlon XP as my main pc for school for a few weeks in the year 2016 and using xfce still didn't give me enough leeway to run YouTube very well even with a GeForce 6800.
I use Cinnamon primarily though. It has its share of stupid bullshit. For example they made an attempt to make the ui customizable like KDE but you can't get a taskbar on the second monitor or do anything useful with custom panels at all. If you want to make a custom panel that does anything other than render a useless gray rectangle on your screen, you're out of luck. You do get a lot of customization options for the window icons/labels on the 1 working taskbar though. Being able to see what's going on at a glance makes all the difference. I do get random occasional crashes that seem to be possibly related to context menu bugs. It doesn't happen often but there's no way to really break out of it without power cycling the computer when it does. Print screen area select doesn't work as well as it does on gnome and you can't change the directory of where screenshots are saved (you're supposed to be able to with dconf editor but it doesn't work).
Tl:dr KDE bad. Gnome meh. Xfce fast. Cinnamon is my favorite one right now all things considered.
When I switched over permanently at the release of proton, I went with Cinnamon since it was the most familiar to me. Before that I tried Ubuntu in the past.
After 2 years on Cinnamon I switched over to KDE Plasma since I want more tweakability and customization and Cinnamon and Gnome in general is just severely lacking in that regard.
And it was a good choice as well since KDE has a lot of options to tweak and I can make it look how I want. I also love fluid animations and KDE has that in spades together with early and now very stable Wayland support.
I could not be happier and I don't see any reason to ever switch to another GUI.
Deepin is great too. Unfortunately it is not fully translated so that you come across Chinese quite often.
Garuda is the first distro to really excite me visually since the KDE3 days. I just wished it booted faster.
Just trying out OpenSuse microOS currently, as an alternative to Fedora Kinoite, and the installer doesnt even load.
I dont like Ubuntus variant of Gnome. I think GNOME can look good but its apps are often horrible. Mint has a better set of simple but powerful tools.
But I would stay with anything rocking KDE. I recommend fedora Kinoite fro ublue.it (better video previews and working RPM firefox basically), its a really great distro.
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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