Not counting the Steam Deck, since KDE isn’t actually turned on while you’re running games.
Normally I’m a Gnome guy, but I’m building a tiny low power portable computer and wanting to keep resource utilization low, so I’m investigating other options.
KDE all the way.
Once I touched kde, It’s always kde.
I’m not even sure.
Whatever comes with mint? I had a hard drive die, and my buddy hooked me up when I realized I couldn’t read the windows key on the sticker any more. He was going to do some kind of fuckery to let me keep 7 despite that, but he’d been talking about Linux for a few years, so I asked what he thought about that.
He asked me a few questions, about what kind of programs I need to use, and when none of them were a pain in the ass for an idiot like me to deal with, he set it up for me. Told me it was mint, helped me set things up where they look nice and made sure I have what I need. Haven’t fucked with anything since, and that was about two years ago.
I think default mint is cinnamon
KDE because I want a setup that just works.
KDE. It doesn’t get in the way.
Xfce of course!
i3wm for me, no DE. I do like KDE when I run a DE though.
I use XFCE mainly because I’m running older hardware. But I really do like it. I have been wanting to try out window managers but have just been too lazy… 😂
Sway mixed with KDE,
games don’t really like it and Pipewire doesn’t work for video recording for some reason (it has to do with the KDE xdg-desktop-portal) but it’s a small price to pay for salvation I guess.I know Sway is a window manager, not a DE - but KDE applications and services seem to fill the gaps.
They’re not necessary, but you won’t catch me dead with a GTK file chooser popup open, and I haven’t figured out how to set up Ranger to replace Dolphin (nor do I really want to).Take a look at Hyprland, they have an xdg-desktop-portal implementation that apparently works with that stuff. https://github.com/hyprwm/xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland https://www.hyprland.org/
No DE just swaywm, I think you can benefit from window managers like i3 or sway for low resource utilization
How does loading up a game through steam work with that? I’m a big fan of Sway (and i3) but I don’t use them on gaming focused systems at all, so I’m curious.
Mostly just fine with i3 my experience. Sometimes I have to move the game window to a different workspace if I want to interact directly with steam, or whatever else I have in the same workspace that I launched the game in, because it keeps forcing it self exclusive/full screen. In some instances, depending on the game, that might mess things up (crash, freeze, missing/stuck mouse cursor), but most of the time it works just fine.
KDE currently. Modern GNOME drives me somewhat insane - too “streamlined”. I used WindowMaker for a long time and somewhat miss it, but I’ve had problems with compatibility with some software (Steam).
No DE, but i3-gaps as WM. Been working great for 5+ years.
not a de, i use hyprland.
KDE Plasma xorg. I use discord streaming quite a bit with friends so Wayland isn’t an option and I’m not using a third party discord client since that’s against discord ToS.
KDE Plasma is great!
Feel free to keep on trucking with your setup. I’ve been using a different solution for discord streaming and wanted to share in case it sounds helpful for you. It’s been an improvement for me. Your mileage may vary.https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/discord-screenaudio
Do not use your main account, make another one only for streaming with audio. Works with x11 and Wayland has more features. It’s a slight annoyance to have to connect to a discord chat with a second account but this works really well for streaming. TOS is sustained with main account and you actually get working audio/video streaming with a second account that won’t get banned (been doing this for years) but even if it does it won’t matter because it’s only used for streaming.Just another option, feel free to disregard if it’s not right for you.
KDE and XFCE (different computers)