 Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel. Today, we're going to talk about the top five desktop environments, according to me. Now, that last part is the most important part because really desktop environments are really a very personal preference. You like what you like. If I had to give you one advice that you could take away from this video, piece of advice that you could take away from this video, I would say it's use all the desktop environments. Don't be afraid to go through and install as many as you can on the distro of your choice and use them all, use them for a couple of weeks each, use them for a couple of days each, whatever, and find the one that you like. That's the best way to do it. Once you find one you like, stick on it for a while and if you get tired of it, switch again. There's no problems with it. That's the best thing about Linux is that you can make these choices and it doesn't, you're not narrowed in and tied onto one exact one choice once you've made it. That being said, if you want to know which ones that I enjoy the most, that's what I'm going to do today. So we're going to do some, this all on Endeavor OS. It's in a virtual machine using VertManager. So the performance may not be all that great. It's in a virtual machine. So just keep that in mind as we go along. Before we jump into the list, make sure you hit the subscribe button. We record videos seven days a week. We do a podcast once a week. We have all this great and amazing content that you can get if you just simply subscribe. So subscribe, will ya? Let's get on to the list. Number five is GNOME. Now, if you've watched the video or watched the channel for any amount of time, you'll know that I'm not a big GNOME fan. This is straight up GNOME. Ubuntu also has its own flavor of GNOME. That also really plays and kind of ties into this choice here. So either way, if you're, let's actually go ahead and make this full screen if I can. View full screen. There we go. That's better. And this is just, this is GNOME. As you can tell, it's slow on VertManager. I have to work, kind of tweak the settings, but if you're using it on metal, it's really fast these days. It's not as slow as it used to be. It doesn't use as much resources right now. It's using even a virtual machine. It's only using 213 megabytes. That's not bad for a desktop environment. GNOME has the best, I think, suite of applications that are developed for it in terms of design. They're also the most, they're the simplest of the application suites because in comparison to the KD or plasma, you're not going to get as many options. You're going to be kind of tied into whatever GNOME's vision of those applications are. But the suite itself is very good. It has maps. They have to do applications, calendars, music players. You name it, GNOME has it. That's really good. It's number five on my list, mostly for personal preferences. I don't care for the layout all that much. If I'm going to use a desktop environment, I want my launcher to be available all the time. I don't want to have to press a key in order to get to it. Also, despite the fact that it is much faster than it used to be, it is still slow. This is a virtual machine, so this is not a good representation of what GNOME can do. Even on metal, it's slower than some of the other desktop environments that are on this list. So that is number five. Number four is the Cinnamon desktop. Cinnamon is mostly known as a Linux Mint creation. It was created by the Mint team as kind of a GTK3 version of Ubuntu Mate. It still kind of lives by the old GNOME 2 theory on design and stuff. If you're coming from Windows, I'm going to say this right now, chances are you will want to use Cinnamon. It's the least complicated out of all of them that looks like Windows. So it also ups the customizability of your desktop that you would get with GNOME while maintaining or without going so far as being the settings beast that is Plasma. So it is also very fast, is well maintained, has access to all the GNOME applications. Most of the time when you're installing Cinnamon on a desktop or on a distro, you'll get all the GNOME apps and it fits in and it's themeable and it's a very good way to get your toes in on Linux without being out of your comfort zone if you're coming from Windows. Personally, I like it. It's fast. Again, this is a virtual machine. The fact that it's taking apparently 10 minutes to start the file manager is a little interesting. But like I said, the virtual machine is very fast on hardware, so you don't have to worry about the problems that I'm having. And the design is very good. Here on Endeavor, they've chosen their own little theme. It's very good. Mint has its own kind of theme. Like I said, it's more customizable than GNOME, which is why it's number four on the list. Okay, number three is one that I can't show you. So I'm still technically in Cinnamon. Number three is Pantheon desktop. It's available almost exclusively on elementary OS, which I do not have installed. I was going to install it, but it's not working on VertManager at all. So what can I do? If you're coming from Mac and you're most familiar with the Mac design, you know, way of doing things, Pantheon is the best way of getting your toes wet into Linux. It's responsive. It has the best design out of all of them, at least out of the box. You can make Plasma look like pretty much whatever you want, but out of the box elementary OS is gorgeous. I think it's a little outdated, but that's just my opinion. I don't care for a lot of what elementary OS does. That's the biggest problem with this one and why it's not higher up on the list. Because it's tied to elementary OS, you kind of have to use it. Now it is available on like Arch Linux, but you have to jump through some hoops in order to get it installed. So just keep that in mind. Like I said, I can't show it to you. I am sorry about that. Okay, number two is XFCE. Now I know what Linux enthusiasts are going to say. XFCE, oh my God, that looks like it's from the 1990s. XFCE is amazing if you're running on low end hardware, but it's also pretty good if you're running on high end hardware. It's just overall very good. Yes, the development on it is very slow. Yes, out of the box most of the time it looks like it comes from the 1990s. But once you get past that and go through and theme it the way you want to look, it looks very good. It's one of the most customizable desktops out there that uses GTK3. I think it's even more customizable than something like Cinnamon. It's definitely more customizable than Pantheon or GNOME. Because both of those require actual hacks in order to customize, whereas XFCE can be themed right out of the box. It's like I said, it runs very well. It only uses like, I don't know, probably 400 megabytes out of the box. So it's very, very, very good. This is just what the XFCE version of Endeavor looks like. This is probably the one that will look the most different on every single distro. Because every single distro does something different with XFCE. Sometimes the panel is on the bottom. Sometimes it's on the top. I've seen some of them on the side. The themes are different. Some of them stick with the more old-fashioned, like Windows 98 style theme. Some of them use the minty themes. And the reason for that is because it's very, very customizable. It doesn't have the hackiness of customizing the things that GNOME and Pantheon both have. And overall, it's just very, very good. It would probably be my number one if my number one didn't exist. So I use XFCE as my daily driver for many, many months when I was still using desktop environments. And overall, I just don't think you could go wrong with using XFCE on pretty much. I have, matter of fact, on every Linux distro that I have, XFCE is still the one that I install. So if you're using a desktop environment, chances are you probably also have a, or if you're using a window manager, excuse me, you probably also have a desktop environment installed kind of as a backup. XFCE is always my backup. It's lightweight. It doesn't have all the crazy dependencies that Plasma has. And it's just a pleasure to use. Even on this VM, I mean, you've been seeing some of the problems I've been having in this VM to get things running fast. It's still, I mean, it's still slow. Obviously the graphics thing is not great, but things appear and disappear pretty quick, pretty quick. I mean, for a virtual machine that has been having problems. Anyways, so let's moving on to number one. You probably guessed what my number one is. Yeah, so moving on to number one. Okay, number one for me is Plasma, KDE Plasma. And it's that reason for number, number reasons. It is by far. I mean, it is not even a competition is by far the most customizable. It has come leaps and bounds in terms of performance is very, very quick and snappy now. Not so much on this virtual machine, but again, the virtual machine has just been giving me problems all day because I don't know anything about virtual manager. So I'm still learning that I also couldn't get it to go full screen for whatever reason, but whatever. Really, it's the customizability that makes Plasma amazing. If we take a look here at the settings app, they're just settings upon settings upon settings upon settings. Now, obviously, that also comes with the drop downside of complexity. So it's by far, I mean, again, not even close to compare to the other ones on the list. It's by far the most complex of all the desktop environments that we've listed today. I'm also considering it's the most complex of any desktop environment. I don't know of a single other one that has this level of complexity. I don't know of another one at all is is as customizable as this is either. So it's kind of a trade off dependent. So the question becomes, if you're a new user, which one should you use now? I go back to my advice and I say use them all. But if you're going to choose one of the ones that are on this list, I would choose XFCE. Honestly, even though I've put Plasma number one, if you're a new user, if you're someone who's used Linux for a little while, however, I would go through and say use Plasma because it allows you to seriously get your chops into, you know, customizing things to make it, you know, the way you want it to look. And that's just, I mean, it's just, I mean, there's there's no getting around the fact that Plasma allows you to do as much more customization built in out of the box than any of the others. It's just that's just the way it is. So those are the top five desktop environments. I know I didn't go into a lot of detail on them. That's just the I could probably do an hour on each of these. The one that I like personally the least is probably Pantheon. But it has nothing to do with the desktop environment itself is mostly because I don't care for elementary OS. So I probably should put that at number five, but I put it at number three because it's very pretty. It's prettier than GNOME and Cinnamon. I have problems with Linux Mint, as everybody knows. So this is just the way I rank them. Come come at me another day. I probably would rank them in a different order, but these are probably the five. Now, the one that I didn't mention is actually pretty good that I kind of forgot about until I was doing this video is Mate. And Mate is a GNOME 2 fork and is very good. The reason why it's not unless it's like it says mostly because I forgot about it. I think that's the way with most people. They've kind of forgotten that Mate exists. That's just the same thing. So if you enjoyed this video, give it a thumbs up. If you want to support the channel and you can do so in any number of ways you can subscribe to the channel, which we highly I highly encourage you to do. You can also go to patreon.com.com. Thank you for watching. I'll see you next time.