What motivates you to choose a DE/WM?

[richb]

Extensive configuration capabilities

Activities
Desktop Effects giving various methods of window popup
Hot corners
Easily configure panel options
Widgets

Afew examples only. I like to continually change the look and feel of the system. Plasma gives me many ways to do that natively.

[thinkpadx]

@amlug wrote:

What does it mean?

It means that I can set it up the way I want with minimal effort and never have to make another adjustment for the life of that release.

nailed it - i agree.

[Bamber]

I simply like Xfce. It's like being at home, where everything is where you expect.

[uncle mark]

I choose KDE today because that's what Mepis and PCLOS used when I was getting my feet wet in Linux all those years ago. Once I get accustomed to something I stick with it until I'm given a good reason to change.

A long, long time ago i briefly left KDE (3 at the time) for gnome2 in the hope that ubuntu might become a viable alternative to MS-Windows or MacOS. That did not pan out. Nowadays, we have diversity, fun and ... fragmentation.

IIRC, the pushback against KDE4 from KDE3 users resulted the Trinity desktop. Same for Gnome3 from Gnome2 users, resulting in Mate. I believe Mepis 8 last used KDE3, and I stuck with it for the longest time, up until M11 when Warren had worked his magic and tamed KDE 4 to his -- and my -- liking.

[rasat]

1. What three distinctive features do I like most? (speed, modular, location of buttons, etc.)
2. What three functions (things that it does) do I like most?

It took a long time to define what I really like and want from a DE or WM, until I tried Gnome. Not the Desktop itself but the features and functions it provides. Until then, my desk was always a mess. The hot-corner Overview was amazing, seeing all windows that are open. The usage of Workspace... email apps in one space, office in another, and graphics in a third space area. This I call... get my work done without it getting in my way. Final discovery, was the Gnome extensions, for example, "Auto Move Window" moves applications automatically to an assigned workspace.
The maintenance and unexpected upgrade changes and slowness of Gnome, pushed me off. But, now I knew what to search and this re-opened the interest in FVWM.

1. Distinctive features I like most
Configurable of any item or look.
A modular setting of individual functions and features (simple "on and off" feature)
Minimal dependency on distro settings and instant load and response.

2. Functions I like most
Pager (switch of workspace)
Tiling, desk iconify, and other functions instantly puts the windows in order or empty the desk.
Icon launcher and panel.
Window move, resize, and maximize at any place without being dependent on the title bar.

3. Missing features
Tags and labels to organize the files and folders. (KDE Dolfin does it but poorly, and the install loads tons of dependency packages.)

[oops]

FI: I also like WMs like Icewm, or Fluxbox ans so ... to have the ability, for children, to customize the menu only for few accessible apps. (a children mode into XFCE would be a good idea)

[8bit]

Editable, right-click on the desktop menu.
Scroll virtual desktops with the mouse wheel.

2³bit

[amlug]

3. Missing features

Missing features or functions that we would like to have, I am adding it in the first post.

In the late 80s, there was one type of file manager not based on folders but on label boxes. Easy to find files from familiar box names. This file feature I am missing. The current vertical directories are often confusing.

[django013]

I got distracted by gnome when they decided to reduce configuration support. I then discovered, that KDE supports maximizing windows vertically only. I very like that feature and so I stayed with KDE. Later I got to know KDE-PIM suite, which I prefer to all other linux mail clients.
That was long before xfce came out.
Some time ago I tested xfce and xinamaron - with both I missed configuration options, I use in KDE.
KDE for me is the most configurable linux desktop system and has *imho* the best integration of KDE and Gnome apps.
Sadly there are apps like firefox, chromium and the like, that don't care for linux window-Manager and so these apps have strange behaviour.

For me, KDE is the only desktop environment, that fulfills j2mcgreg statement: let me the work do the way I want it to

[AVLinux]

Hi,

I kind of lost interest in XFCE4 once it became clear that resource consumption was no longer a priority (literally within less than 100Mb of KDE Plasma consumption in many cases) and secondly I find it's built in compositing to be kind of blah and although you can theme it quite nicely and soup up it's compositing abilities with Compton that also introduces more memory usage and some visual peculiarities of it's own. As someone who also is a distributor I find some of the schema stuff and the configuration XML stuff for XFCE4 to be quite annoying and overly complicated although to be fair they are improving it with each release. I would say for me 75% of the greatness of XFCE4 is Thunar and it is pretty portable to install with other DE/WM's

You would think this all would drive me into the loving arms of KDE Plasma but as a longtime Linux user I feel KDE may work 'too well' and I find it very enterprise-y and windows-y.. Don't get me wrong Linux should have an adequate contender to compete with MacOS and Windows and I think KDE succeeds very well at that so my complaints are not really about it's functionality more about it's very corporate presentation and how as a part-time Windows User still I don't want my Linux experience to look like some unique new Windows theme..

I've settled on the outlier underdog Enlightenment+Thunar... why?

- It is extremely efficient while presenting with excellent and attractive compositing even without direct GPU support, the developer is obsessed with not wasting RAM...lol.
- It's uniquely constructed with composited layers and operations like the File Manager are integrated in a way to not be distinctly separate processes as they would be on other DE's.
- It handles things like unifying GTK and QT themes invisibly without extra configs or applications.
- It handles scaling very well as part of the DE itself.
- It is built on modules so you can simply turn off any modules you don't require and pare it down to only what hardware your system has.
- It's internal files and configurations are in binary formats not text files so it very directly runs these as executables instead of text files to be interpreted by separate binary programs.
- You can speak directly with the developer on IRC and if you make a good case for improvements or features he is pretty receptive (he has occasional bad days like everyone else).
- It's admittedly a bit quirky not in an unstable way (quite the opposite) and some of it's incomplete and missing features are a bit vexing at times..
- It's not a 100% complete DE/WM so it needs some tweaker ingenuity, as a Linux User I like the opportunity to be creative within the DE itself, I think this is also what drives the excellent efforts on MX-Fluxbox..