What's the best Linux desktop environment ?

[cavedweller]

Re: What's the best Linux desktop environment ?

If I am loading the system for my wife it will have KDE on it. She can navigate in it comfortably enough to do what she wants to do.

Myself I preferred desktop is xfce. If I feel the need to dress it up there is cairo or Awn. I prefer a single panel and running from the right click.

What ever it is will have debian fueling the engine. I don't care for Ubuntu but can live with Kubuntu. I have used Mint which is pretty newbie friendly in it's various flavors.

At the end of the day though my own distro preference is debian testing (wheezy). I can customize it and tweak it to only have what I want on it. Upgrade it once a week to keep it current because it is rolling.

If I am in the mood for the full meal deal, KDE will be the desktop.

Like everyone has already said, each person is different. The best part of using linux is you can set it up to do what you want or need it to do. Kind of like buying a car. You might be a person who wants electric windows, cruise control, and alot of bells and whistles, or you may be a person that is just trying to get from point A to B in a older clunker. The cool thing about linux is it gives you the ability to build your vehicle to fit your current hardware situation and needs.

[whatthefunk]

Re: What's the best Linux desktop environment ?

A settings daemon (XFCE does too), a session manager (I dunno what lxsession does, but it certainly doesn't save and restore your session), hell even a centralized settings manager is lacking (even though lxappearance is a fine tool), not to mention a power policy and so on. All of these things either can't be implemented, or have to be implemented manually, which is just as easy/hard to do in Openbox standalone.

This is all true, but they are making headway. At the moment, settings in LXDE are scattered all over the place and many lack a GUI, but it is improving. I read somewhere that one of the LXDE team's main goals in upcoming releases was to improve integration, which is does need. I like LXPanel a lot. You can do a lot with it and its easy to customize. For a low-spec system, Id say that LXDE is one of the best options out there. Crunchbang is a better option, but a lot of people want something that looks a bit better and has a more sophisticated GUI than Openbox provides.