I’ve been running Linux Mint under XFCE for a while now and I am growing tired of it. I originally had cinnamon which I did not really like so I decided to go with XFCE and customize it to my liking.
However it’s been almost a year with that setup and I want to switch it up. I have never used Gnome before but I have a feeling it is the perfect DE for me.
I’ve heard a few stories of people trying to switch from Cinnamon to Gnome which was pretty unstable. However, does anyone know how going from XFCE to Gnome would be?
Why do you ask? Install it as a second DE and give it a try. You can alvays switch back if you don’t like it.
If you like xfce, I think that kde is more similar to it than gnome. So I would recommend giving kde a try too.
An easy way to test out both is to just use a live image booted from a USB. You could always install them to your everyday PC but then you have a lot more packages installed and I personally would rather keep my installed packages to a minimum. If you can’t do a live cd because your os doesn’t provide one then I would try a vm or a different drive that you can boot into.
op did mention they tired of xfce
live image is a great shout. you could ventoy to boot into the different images as quick as possible
It’s fine for the most part. Just keyboard shortcuts won’t work in default and theming is slightly difficult. You have add extensions to gnome to increase functionality.
Truth be told, once I made myself live without extensions for a week, I realized I never needed them in the first place. Gnome has a way of making you discover a slightly different way of doing the same thing that in hindsight just works better with the overall system than an extension would.
But to each their own…
With something like dash to dock or dash to panel, you get extra functionality while still retaining the stock workflow of gnome. I myself use near vanilla gnome with dash to dock, clipboard indicator and gsconnect. Out of those only dash to dock modifies the workflow but in a way that supplements the stock workflow.
It should work on Mint as well, but the theming may be off you will probably have to redo Icons and such. Just FYI, XFCE can totally look like Gnome (look at rhino Linux) if you theme it. You may consider installing the SaveDesktop app and redoing your XFCE setup (the unixporn community has some great inspiration)
No love for MATE in this thread…
I love Linux Mint, and always used cinnamon. I Loath the gnome experience, and XFCE has always struck me as too old feeling and sparse. Currently I use EndeavourOS with KDE Plasma and I couldn’t be happier.
If you’d like to try out KDE but don’t want to move away from a more stable experience to an Arch based distro, I can recommend MX Linux. It’s based on Debian stable instead of Ubuntu, and has a KDE plasma spin.
if you decide on Gnome, keep in mind there are two main paths to follow – stock Gnome (“as the developers intended”) and Gnome with extensions (ie. addons or plugins or mods) – extensions can do everything from minor aesthetic tweaks (Blur My Shell, Rounded Corners, Remove Rounded Corners) right on up to completely changing the behavior of the window manager (PaperWM, Pop Shell) – which side of that particular divide you end up on is purely personal preference
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I do eventually plan on switching over to OpenSUSE when I have more free time on my hands for a full fresh setup and to learn a new distro, but as of now I am a busy college student so I am not looking to switch until the summer
I used to use xfce quite a lot (very lightweight and great for anything virtual, especially). I recently installed the latest Ubuntu with gnome. It’s actually pretty good, but… Oh man do I ever wish that top notification bar could be merged with the task bar (and relocated to the bottom). Also, the extensions designed to auto-hide it no longer work!
My reflex action to close a window is to mouse up to the corner of the screen and click. This is ineffective if there’s an immovable top bar there in the way and taking up limited screen real estate.
I’d switch to KDE (or Sway, or…?) , but they don’t have a Wayland RDP server… yet. (I use this.)
Anyway, give it a try. Gnome is okay when you get used to it, but my impression is that it seems to resist flexibility for its users, and this is quite sad, actually. (I’m still using it, and I’m eager to be wrong here.)
