After trying out Cosmic, Gnome,KDE Plasma, and Hyprland, I feel like plasma is the most usable for me coming from Windows. It solves the gripes I had about lack of customizability while still starting me off with a familiar homebar. I will be going back and forth with gnome for a while.

I really like gnome and the sliding desktops, and all the extensions seem to make it very customizable as well, but not directly like plasma, instead you mix and match (or make) extensions to get the look you want. (correct me if im wrong, I used it for a day)

Hyprland seems very nice for multitasking but the keyboard focus of the presets ive tried doesn’t really appeal to me, I like being able to just use my mouse sometimes.

Cosmic, is definitely an alpha and im interested to see what it becomes, wont be using it now.

  • harsh3466@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    My preference is the opposite of yours. I just recently set up Hyprland and I love it for the focus on keyboard and the ease of customizing the keybinds.

    The other thing I love is the tiling. I almost always have two windows side by side and in every other DE I’ve used (haven’t used cosmic), I always had to faff about to get my windows half and half or into the quarters. So pair that with the keyboard focus and hyprland is the winner for me.

    • chrash0@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      yeah i don’t know what the use case is for hiding or partially hiding windows as if they’re papers on a desk other than sheer skeuomorphism.

      • catloaf@lemm.ee
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        2 days ago

        I can have multiple windows open at large size, arrange them to overlap so I can peek at the important part and click to bring one to the front. Like in a file browser, I can have multiple directories in multiple windows and switch back and forth without losing sight of the other one entirely.

      • ISOmorph@feddit.org
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        2 days ago

        I tried working with tiling and while it felt kinda cool, in the end it didn’t solve any problem I have. At most I’m working in 2 different windows 99% of the time and I have a second monitor for that. So it’s not that hiding windows is a use case, it’s that tiling them isn’t one.

        • Dil@is.hardlywork.ingOP
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          2 days ago

          Hyprland is kinda cool since you can still have windows over windows if you need/want it, I was worried since the width can be off and its easy to just open a window and scale iy manually to see text properly, it doesnt solve any problem I have tho, just forces me to use the keyboard more than I want to.
          I definitely want to spend a sunday just customizing and tinkering with it tho, sounds fun.

          Rnow plasma works super well for me, love that you can right click windows and have them always stay on top or always be below, useful when using the transparent terminal. Hyprland has a top popdown terminal (at least the config I used) which is kinda sick, but not really necessary lol.

      • harsh3466@lemmy.ml
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        2 days ago

        Agree. It’s a windowing behaviour I’ve hated forever. Before jumping to linux I used macOS for a long time and the only thing that made it tolerable was a toolbar app that let me create custom keybindings for splitting windows. When inwent Linux I went gnome initially as it gave pretty close to the same functionality built in with super+arrow keys, but there is some stuff about GNOME that just does not work for me. So for me, Hyprland is great

    • Dil@is.hardlywork.ingOP
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      2 days ago

      I often dont use my keyboard when casually browsing, reaching for it constantly is annoying in those cases, I’m assuming yall that use linux more are more used to the opposite and not using a graphical interface.

    • Dil@is.hardlywork.ingOP
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      2 days ago

      plasmas had no issues going half and half or quarters, better than windows at least, but yeah my monitors are relatively small compared to what other ppl have, so i never want to divide by more than 4