[sjellis]

These days, I am really impressed by the MATE desktop environment:

https://mate-desktop.org/

It does the stuff that you need without excess weight, the look and feel is flexible enough that you can make it look like other systems if you prefer, and the small development team consistently put out new releases to fix and refine it without any drama.

AWS use it for their Linux cloud-based desktop service, probably for these reasons.

Ubuntu MATE is a great showcase for what can be done with MATE. It's arguably more user-friendly than the main Ubuntu, with the MATE desktop and quick-start features like a well-curated software selector.

https://ubuntu-mate.org/

[daniel-thompson]

MATE is fantastic, I've been running it for the last few years. The central feature is that it gives you a desktop with familiar features and idioms; it doesn't try to "reimagine the experience" or reorganize all the functionality or any of the other stuff that drives me crazy about e.g. Gnome 3. It's the DE for people who want to spend as little time as possible thinking about a DE.

[netizen-936824]

I found tiling was better for "not thinking about my DE"

In which I never think about Tue size or placement of my windows. Its mostly automatic and I can swap them between spots with one click. Where with gnome and mate, if I want two windows next to each other I have to putz around d with dragging them to the right snap points

[daniel-thompson]

You can run i3 with MATE, see https://mattgreer.dev/blog/mate-and-i3/

[netizen-936824]

Interesting, thank you!

[smoldesu]

With how much of a trainwreck GTK4/GNOME 40 was, I cannot blame you. I'm still writing my apps in GTK 3.38, and I probably won't update my apps until they get their Adwaita garbage ironed out. Breaking compatibility with stylesheets is a regression, and I refuse to yield to this "just embrace binary themes and maybe (like icons in the filepicker) we'll impliment it later!" mentality. Thankfully I don't have to, and there's a great community of people who are still perfectly contented to stay on 3.38.

[nycticorax]

The trouble I have with the Mate desktop these days is that most of the GTK applications out there are moving or have moved to GTK 3, and generally take 'advantage' of various GTK3-isms in their user interface. So you're going along using the app and them you hit some button and are confronted with a UI element that looks completely out of place, and often isn't styled properly.

So I gave up on it and switched to KDE. It's not as beautiful as Gnome 2 was (IMHO), but it's not bad, and it's still a platform that people write apps for. (To the extent that any Linux-based platform is a platform that people write apps for.)

[clircle]

I like MATE, but it (and most other DEs) doesn't have HiDPI support. So, back to Gnome.

[robgibbons]

I use MATE with HiDPI on my XPS 15 and a 4k Dell monitor.

Look at the MATE Tweaks tool and you'll find the option.

[renewedrebecca]

MATE definitely supports HiDPI, although I don't think it tries very hard to auto-detect it. (But I'm running a 1440p monitor. 4k might be better.)

[dangerbird2]

I've found cinnamon has the best HiDPI support, especially when you need different fractional scaling factors for multiple monitors and can't use a Wayland-based DE because of your GPU drivers (looking at you, NVidia)