In anticipation of debian stretch release in a few months. I'm

>Is Xfce4 still the only usable DE 3 years later since jessie's release?

I'll still be using it for sure. I've just become too accustomed to it.

>>59572974
>Is gnome3 still an unusable mess designed for tablets?
It's worse. They are pushing GNOME+Wayland now which has a noticeable performance drop across the board and many programs still choke on it.

>Is KDE plasma still a hot piece of crashing shit?
Most shit got fixed, some wrinkles still remain. Use the 5.8 LTS version or newer, though.

>LXQt still not stable?
I'm using that now. It's stable as in "it hasn't crashed yet", but it's rough around the edges and has basically zero polish. It should be fine in a year or two.

>Has mate improved at all or are they still stuck with the gnome2 era of feature set?
It's decent. I haven't used Gnome 2 much so I can't compare.

>How's cinnamon?
Never used it much.

>Is Xfce4 still the only usable DE 3 years later since jessie's release?
It's the best thing since sliced bread. Just get a good compositor like compton because the built-in one is shit.

>>59573167
damn son
Looks like I'm still gonna be using xfce
It's pretty good but I wanted to have some variety. I've been using this since wheezy

GNOME 3 remains useless if you don't stuff it with extensions.

KDE is improving, but it's not quite there yet. If you're going to use it, make sure you disable the bloat (Baloo and Akonadi). Dolphin is still the best file manager there is.

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Install Linux Mint 18.1

>>59573211
Then try MATE. I found it to have a similar "no nonsense" approach Xfce has.

>>59573255
Does gnome still miss window buttons on it's main panel? I think it was the main feature that it missed that forced me to uninstall it within a week. I remember trying an extension for it but it was buggy as fuck . and having 2 panels on the screen wastes too much space.

It's sad that noone seems to be able to develop a sane DE besides the xfce guys. The problem with xfce4 is that the development is very slow. Some of the annoying bugs never got fixed until I patched them myself and sent them to upstream

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Gnome3 with extensions is my favourite DE, preferred it over KDE and cinnamon

>>59573310
>Does gnome still miss window buttons on it's main panel?
They're not on by default but you can install Gnome Tweak Tool and turn them on from there.

>>59573319
Gnice.

>>59573348
Glad to hear it.
I think I'll wait for ubuntu 17.04 release and then try gnome, kde and mate in a vm and see how it goes from there

>>59572974
KDE is good, I've been using plasma on stretch for a while and it's gotten pretty stable. And you can customize the hell out of it and get all kinds of cool effects like desktop cube and wobbly windows.

If you have an Android device, KDE Connect is really nice. You can do file transfer both ways, use your phone as a touchpad, get text messages on your desktop.

>>59573405
I don't suggest using GNOME on Ubuntu, they have old versions of some gnome packages for no good reason and have hacky shit patches on gtk from unity which are too poor of quality and logic or reason to be accepted upstream.

>>59572974
Cinnamon is ok, but not very configurable.

>>59573446
This. If you want GNOME, try it on Fedora.

>tfw want to try using kde and pure upstream gnome but every distro except ubuntu is shit

is there a distro i can install that will let me have good font rendering and all the proprietary bullshit codecs in a few clicks like ubuntu?

>>59573319
As much as I love kde, I envy having usable widgets in the panel.
Take the battery for example:
Why is it hard for people to find a way to put the percentage in?
You just read a text file and print it to the panel, why do I need to make my own?

>>59573533
Fedora with RPMFusion repos.
Or openSUSE with Packman repos and respective "upstream branding" packages installed.

fedora is pretty good with gnome 3. Gnome has really grown into it's own thing and it's really keyboard driven, second maybe to unity and a tilling window manager. Gnome is polished and easy to use. What I don't like is the fucking window bars that are gigantic that half the time have a settings box and half the time don't, the same goes for the top bar, sometimes programs have options in the top bar application menu and sometimes they don't, but it took the menu bar that worked fine and made it confusing. Even unity does the menu bar better than gnome. There is also no button for manual sleep or hibernation without extensions. Gnome3 has pros and cons but I like it and would suggest you give it a try.

>>59573167
Performance drop? Wtf are you on about. If you mean "programs made for Xorg that are run through xorg-wayland are slow pieces of shit because they use xorg instead of wayland", you'd be correct.

>>59573839
Firefox is the only program I use often that is still on xwayland but that will be fixed soon. Most programs are moving away from xorg and xwayland

>>59573319
What font is that?

>>59573839
I've used GNOME with both Wayland and X on Fedora 25 and there was a small performance drop on Wayland. Desktop effects (minimizing/restoring windows, opening dash, ...), for example, had some lag and stutter whereas they were noticeably smoother on X.
AMD A10-5750M with HD 8670G, which is a Core i3 equivalent, so pretty conventional hardware.

>>59573944
>Most programs are moving away from xorg and xwayland
No. They are adding support for Wayland, but definitely not moving away from X.
X will stick around for the next 5 years, like it or not.

>>59574059
I should have clarified moving away from xorg as a dependency. even xfce will eventually be usable on wayland, eventually

>>59574016
Cantarell 11

comes stock with gnome i believe

>>59572974
Now having debian 8 updated to 9 with cinnamon, works as expected

>>59572974
Cinnamon > XFCE > KDE > LXDE/Qt > MATE > GNOME

>>59572974
>Is Xfce4 still the only usable DE 3 years later since jessie's release
Yes