Yay my new desktop :D
Someone enlighten me. How many active desktop projects are there currently? (Not just window managers…)
KDE Plasma, Trinity (is it active? Fork of KDE 3.5)
Gnome, Mate, Cinnamon (fork all the things!), or “reskins” like Unity or Budgie?
LXQt, Xfce… Is enlightenment still active as a project?
Does anyone use Deepin – appears to be a partial fork of KDE (kwin, etc.) with new desktop environment built around it rather than use Plasma.
Or Pantheon (Vala+GTK3?).
Cosmic is from the ground up, recent and active I guess.
Missing anything?
Here’s a decent list: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Desktop_environment#List_of_desktop_environments
Arch based list obvs so won’t include every single one but not too shabby.
Deepin was my long running DE for a while until they changed to be more windows like and I ditched it for budgie. Shortlived as it just wasn’t being maintained and updated enough for my liking. Moved to Pantheon for quite a while but it got annoying having to fix it breaking with updates. I ditched it and was going to go back once they released the distro agnostic version. I don’t know if that ever eventuated because I gave up waiting and have been happy with KDE for several years now.
Yeah that checks out.
I’m fairly new to this space so not aware of the more obscure or older ones but my list of popular Desktop Environments would be:
- KDE Plasma
- GNOME
- Cinnamon
- MATE
- Budgie
- XFCE
- LXQt
- Cosmic
I’m using cinnamon, but want to use the new plasma on a debian based distro. But nothing is supporting it out of the box just yet.
But yes, there are a lot
If your using debian: you can ig backport kde 6 from debian testing or sid,but just a warning you might sacrifice stability.
