Comment by TillE
4 years ago
GNOME has enjoyed the status of being basically usable, if not particularly good, throughout its history.
I still remember KDE going through what felt like years of being unusably broken during its clumsy transition from 3 to 4. That's a lot of the desktop Linux experience, really - everything constantly in flux, never quite usable. I don't blame anyone for this, it's hard to get stuff done without someone paying a team to do it, but it's really unfortunate.
After flip flopping a bunch, I ditched both GNOME and KDE for Xfce and haven't felt like I've missed much. It might need some better defaults, but you only have to fix them once on a new install.
Nothing huge changes, and really, I'm not looking for much. A launcher. A way to switch windows. Volume and brightness buttons/applets are nice to have. A system tray.
I've heard somebody somewhere along the lines call it the "Debian of DEs" and I can't argue with that.