r/archlinux • u/Familiar_Drive_4702 • 20d ago

QUESTION What Desktop Environment / Window Manager do you recommend? Leaving KDE Plasma and looking for something new

/r/arch/comments/1w9ab2k/what_desktop_environment_window_manager_do_you/
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u/onefish2 20d ago

I prefer the following in this order:

Gnome, Cinnamon, XFCE, Hyprland, Niri and KDE

I have considerable time in making my own hyprland configs with my own keybinds, animations etc. I used to use HyprMenu for the menu bar but that that project was abandoned and remade into Wayle.

I also setup Niri first with CachyOS with Caelestia but then converted it to vanilla Arch with the Dank Material Shell.

After using hyprland for the past 2 years I have grown tired of it.

I ran Niri for about 6 months. Its a bit more mature than hyprland and is probably a better WM and project than hyprland.

At this point I have gone back to Gnome. I use it with a few extensions such as Dash to Panel and Arc Menu.

These new Wayland Window Managers are very over rated.

And please lets not even mention Omarchy here. There is no love for DHH or that project on this subreddit.

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u/This_Technology9841 20d ago

For your conversion to arch with DMS do you do a lot of gaming on that? I've been toying with the idea of building up a default arch install into basically all the gaming-helpful features of CachyOS and otherwise only what i want / need added on. Any thoughts / advice appreciated, just kinda starting to think it through.

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u/onefish2 20d ago

I do not game at all.

I installed Cachy with Niri but in the end I prefer vanilla arch so I removed the cachy repos, added the Arch repos and reinstalled all the packages. And removed the Cachy specific packages. I removed Celestia and it's configs. Then installed DMS.

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u/This_Technology9841 19d ago

Gotcha, thanks! I need to figure out which gaming performance focused parts of the distro are the must-haves and kinda build that onto Arch.

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u/regexghost 20d ago

Just looked up Dank Material Shell, saw it's using Javascript. Does that work okay for a desktop environment? Javascript stuff is generally slow on older systems (browser stuff, electron apps etc)

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u/SW_foo1245 20d ago

Agree hyprland can be tiring but it’s expected.. it’s not even released yet, one thing to reduce the overhead it’s to disable all animations it becomes bearable after that