Oct 23, 2020 The desktop environment is usually the core of your Linux desktop system for how it looks/feels. If you don’t get a good user experience, it will be difficult to use a Linux distro on your desktop, right? So, which is the best desktop environment available? Trying out each and every desktop environment is a very time-consuming and tiring task.

Linux is very flexible when it comes to how graphical desktops looks like. However almost all make use of X. To explain in a sentence what is X, I would say X is the infrastructure needed to run graphical programs, without having any graphical software. So the various desktops make use of this infrastructure that forms a nicely powerful layer to the hardware.

Desktop icons are defined in the.desktop files found in /Desktop. Pcmanfm wants to be clever and smart and does not show their filenames but interprets their contents. Pcmanfm finds inside those.desktop text files a link to an icon and a name to be shown. The easiest way to get such files is going to the menu and right click the mouse and select put to desktop.
I've tested the best tools I've found with: a - GNOME under Linux Mint installed b - GNOME under Linux Mint Live USB c - MATE under Linux Mint d - LXDE under Lubuntu e - JWM under Puppy Linux (JWM is not a desktop environment but a stacking window manager). F - XFCE under Debian Buster. Env grep DESKTOPSESSION= (so-so) a & b - DESKTOPSESSION=gnome c - DESKTOPSESSION=default.

The desktop that you mostly use and where you have discovered all features needed is probably the one you like the most. Therefore it is recommending a desktop might never be based on a neutral opinion.

It is a good idea to use applications not thighed to the desktop environment, so the work and data will be still available on major version updates or desktop changes.

KDE is a full featured desktop using the GPL version of the QT libraries and comes with many applications that simply are there and work without being worried how to install and configure them (screen capture, system monitor, info center, file find, file manager that asks to do links instead of copy and duplicate files.. ).

Advantage: KDE is a complete solution.

Desktop Environmental Pump For Sprinkler Systems

Disadvantage: It might be considered a bit bloated, having big foot print and makes the used depending on KDE applications.

Important

The many (but not all) KDE applications can be installed easily when not using KDE.https://www.kde.org/applications/. They have obvious dependencies to QT.

Once having installed a program that depends on QT, the KDE applications do not require a lot of dependencies.

Links: https://www.kde.org/

KDE can have many window effects as wobbly windows and the desktop cube. For this, it is important that direct rendering is working and KDE gets started with the Window manager plasma (not Openbox). The the desktop cube can be made visible by a key sequence.

Note

Simply short pressing the key sequence to see the cube and then use the mouse to move around. When done, re-press the key sequence to go back. The default key sequence Ctrl + F11 might conflict with an other already set key sequence and therefore not work. In this case a custom key sequence as Ctrl + space can be set.

Figure 5.1. KDE cube

The desktop environment Gnome has a long tradition and is probably the best compromise between full blown slow fancy desktop and fast, friendly intuitive and usable. It uses gtk library and is therefore full GPL. Ubuntu makes use of Gnome.

Gtk stands for Gimp tool Kit and shows it origin. Gimp is the Gnu Image Manipulation Program.

For Gentoo set the automount useflag, to have the gnome-volume-manager dealing with the devices plugged in. See the D-Bus section for more details.

Gnome 3 depends on systemd and therefore a migration is tricky. An other indication that it has become a big chunk is that it does no more run with compiz.

Xfce means XForms Common Environment, however new versions of it do not make use of Xforms anymore, to keep the name, Xfce means something as X Freakin' Cool Environment.

It is considerably less complex than KDE and Gnome, but still well featured and fast.

Distributions on Netbooks as Linpus for the Acer Aspire One make use of Xfce.

LXDE the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment is an other attempt to have what many people want, a non bloated fast simple desktop. http://lxlinux.com/#index and for gentoo https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/LXDE

Many distributions as Knoppix has jumped toward LXDE. Additionally it is well layered and follows the standards. To get it fancy LXDE can be run with compiz.

Since it is lightweight not too many applications come. The following might be considered to additionally install

Leafpad a gui editor
LXDM a display manager to login graphically (Add lxdm to /etc/conf.d/xdm). The configuration file is /etc/lxdm/lxdm.conf . There is also a simple gui lxdm-config

Some other packages are recommended to be installed as:

To have media mounted via gui make sure gvfs is installed
check that consolekitd is running (On gentoo rc-update add consolekit default)
file-roller to get archiving support
shutterbug for screen-shots

To see date and seconds click on the clock, go to the digital clock settings and insert %F %R:%S

For gentoo emerge lxde-meta and echo 'exec startlxde' >> ~/.xinitrc

LXDE used gtk2 and there are no plans to move it to gtk3. As alternative there is a move to QT https://lxqt.org/

Desktop icons are defined in the *.desktop files found in ~/Desktop and . pcmanfm wants to be clever and smart and does not show their filenames but interprets their contents. pcmanfm finds inside those *.desktop text files a link to an icon and a name to be shown.

The easiest way to get such files is going to the menu and right click the mouse and select put to desktop. However going to /usr/share/applications and see what desktop files are already available and then just copy them to ~/Desktop. The *.desktop files is an other option. Since the *.desktop files are text files they can be edited using a text editor or created via command lxshortcut -i ~/Desktop/<name>.desktop that starts a gui to create a *.desktop file. Path to the executable, Name on the desktop and finally an icon has to be placed. Icons for that can be found under /usr/share/icons or /usr/share/pixmaps for those directories not path and file extension must be added. For Icons in other directories the path must be present.

Important

Desktop files should be validated using the desktop-file-validate tool.

Finally right click on the mouse lets to move menu icons to the desktop.

Note

However also documents and links to documents can be placed can be placed in the Desktop directory and appear as icons on the screen.

The menu is made from *.desktop files in ~/.local/share/applications for user menus and /usr/share/applications for global menus. The parameter

inside those files defines the category where they pop up. There is the java application lxmed that is a gui for this.

To have the terminal running:

Inside the directory /usr/share/applications also a file mimeinfo.cache can be found. Having a file of a mime type, then the desktop file handling this type of data can be found. This cache file is created from the *.desktop files using their mime type declaration:

File managers as pcmanfm make use of desktop files in

Desktop Environmentslxpup