So I am an aesthetics guy when it comes to my distro and desktop environment. I like things to look clean and visually appealing. Last night I kinda took a deep dive into the world of different DE’s. Of course there’s the popular ones that everybody knows about i.e. Cinnamon, Xfce, KDE, Mate, Gnome, etc., however there’s a whole other world of random desktops that I was never aware of! Also it’s difficult to find a clear list of all the available environments.
Basically, how the heck do I find out more about DE’s and which distro they are compatable with. Of course I always check the distros site, but they usually list the big ones and often times will say “plus others”… how can I find out which desktops are available for which distros? I’ve find it rather tricky to figure out.
Another thing that kinda tripped me out is that it seems not all DE’s such as the popular ones I listed, appear to be the same visually. For instance, XeroLinux is very beautiful to me and from what I’ve gathered, it runs KDE Plasma. Imo it looks nothing like the actual KDE Plasma OS… are there like different versions of Gnome, KDE, Mate, etc. that look different than others? To me, I figure they would and should all look the same. Idk, it’s all a bit confusing to me and I hope you kind folks could shed some light. Thank you
I should mention that I have zero interest in the window manager or tiler or whatever they are called. To me, they are super ugly and very confusing to understand :)
Well, if you want to know what Gnome is supposed to look like (I mean the “default” setup) check out Fedora Workstation. Anything that looks different from that is modified. Several other Distros ship with a default Gnome desktop as well - OpenSuse Tumbleweed/Leap, Arch’s default setup, Vanilla OS, et al.
Gnome is actually one of the more difficult to modify. By default, there’s light mode, dark mode, and… that’s it. However, you can make some pretty radical changes with extensions and user themes. While it’s fairly easy to add extensions, user themes take a bit more more work to get going, and require some knowledge of CSS to make.
Does that answer your question?
Yes it does, thank you. So if the desktop is “officially” supported by a distro, they should all relatively look the same?
Not exactly. The Distros can make lots of changes. Ubuntu officially supports Gnome, but has a bunch of preinstalled extensions and settings tweaks that change the look and feel.
If you want to know the “official” look of Gnome, as I said, check out Fedora. By default, I’m pretty sure the only enabled plugin puts the Fedora name in the bottom right corner.
In fact, if you want to know what the most plain, standard setup for any major DE is, check Fedora’s spin: Fedora KDE, XFCE, LXDE, and so on all start very vanilla on Fedora.
Ahh ok so this is basically my point. I’ve done a lot of distro hopping and noticed some distros GNOME or KDE or whatever, desktops look way different from other distros using the same desktop. I have no clue what goes into such customization and I’d rather not install a lesser know, possibly unstable distro just because of their specific spin of a DE, ya know? I suppose I need to learn more about customizing environments myself, but don’t know where to begin, other than the obvious built in settings you can tweak