Yeah, it’s never sat very well with me. I’ve gone through cycles where I’ll use a good bit of AUR, to none at all. I had been using a handful of things, but realized that almost all of it was Python stuff that I could more safely install with pip or uv, so I’ve migrated all of that. The one thing left is Manuskript, and it hardly gets updates anyway.

I actually like Gnome’s paradigm. But I also used CDE-style desktops for quite a long time, so I’m not really locked to the Windows ways. I would say Gnome is CDE inspired, but with the weird activities fuckery.

Ultimately, Gnome is just too lacking in customization. No panel, no notification area, window switching behavior… I have to install extensions for basic functionality. Which is fine at first glance, but then I have to be careful with updates when a new version is released, until the extensions update. Then I have to chase new extensions for the ones that are really lagging or cease development. Which happens a lot, because most people seem to get sick of dealing with that shit and stop using Gnome at some point.

Honestly, if Gnome would let me show the panel when docked and banish it to activities when undocked, I could probably live with all the rest. Also, have they fixed reversal of swipe gestures when you reverse scroll direction? That’s just absurdly bad UX, which is actually out of character. We might disagree with a lot of UX decisions from the Gnome project, but they’re usually refined and precise. The swipe gesture issues are just plain broken, or were, it’s been a couple years since I’ve used it.

KDE is just too much, and there’s quirky stuff I’m really not fond of. I’m using it now, have been for about 6 months now, which is by far the longest I have going back to trying it occasionally starting back in the late 90’s.

I’m excited for Cosmic, I used that for a good stretch, and it might be time to give it another try soon. I’m also excited for my old friend XFCE, and some other mid-weight DEs, finally finding their way to Wayland.

I thought I was the only one, it’s just so easy to use it as your base working folder. Things get organized out as whatever it is moves forward to some arbitrary point.

I absolutely adore being able to click into and between genres and artists to get to albums and songs instantly. I want to ultimately move back to MPD, maybe Navidrome or Subsonic, but… I just love Quod Libet.

I came up using primarily Fluxbox and XFCE, and could tolerate Gnome 2. Had a love/hate relationship with Gnome 3 for awhile. Never really liked any version of KDE, but…

I used Cosmic for about a year, just switched to KDE last weekend. For me, Cosmic is the first Wayland DE to hit that sweet spot of lightweight window manager feel, with a few conveniences like integrated panels, notification bus (which is bidirectional, unlike KDE’s), small application suite, and some useful applets. I’m always tempted to go back and roll my own with LabWC and god knows what at this point, because it’s not quite what I want ideally, but it’s quite good.

It’s still a bit buggy, recently I started having an issue where windows would lose their position and size after minimizing and restoring. I’ve long had that issue after unlock. Others feel differently, but tiling has never been great for me, I hope they rework it, or introduce more customizable snapping without the rigidity of full tiling.

But it’s lightweight and clean, fairly customizable (compared to Gnome, not KDE), and generally sane. We’ll see how Budgie and XFCE come along on Wayland, they both have a far more mature DE as a whole, but Cosmic does have a head start on Wayland, and has the benefit of being a fresh code base.

I’m hoping Cosmic, along with the lightweight DE ports (?) to Wayland, kick start development of more lighter weight, non-DE-centric applications with native Wayland support.

It might be because DSM-V was released in 2013.