Choosing a Desktop Environment (Linux for Noobs 3)

[Music] hello and welcome to another episode of linux for noobs in today's episode we're going to talk about desktop environments because choosing the distribution isn't the only important choice you're going to make as a new linux user choosing the desktop environment that's right for you is also a very important choice and sometimes it's very overwhelming to new users that we have so many desktop environments that makes the decision of which one to go with and which distribution to go with all that much harder but in this video i'm going to show you guys all of the popular desktop environments give you a general overview and then that might help you make the decision as far as which one caters more for your use case and then once you make a decision it'll be that much easier to choose a distribution to go along with which is actually going to be the subject of the next video but in today's video it's all about desktop environments so what i'm going to do is go through all of the popular desktop environments that way you guys get a general idea of what sets one apart from another and then it also helps you make a decision as far as which one you prefer which one might fit your use case better and i'm not going to go too in depth into any one desktop environment this isn't a tutorial video but i think it's a very important thing that you see the desktop environments that are available that'll help you make your choice as far as which one to go with in the next video i'm going to give you an overview of the more popular linux distributions that are available and armed with the knowledge that you're going to get in this video as well as the next that'll help you make a decision as far as which distribution to go along with on your laptop or desktop before we get started there's a few things i'd like to tell you about my channel and then we'll get right into it thank you for checking out learn linux tv your source for linux related fun and learning and i just love 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lenote is awesome and with that out of the way let's get right into today's video [Music] all right so here i am with the gnome desktop i'm actually running fedora but fedora provides a very vanilla meaning unchanged gnome experience so what you are seeing right now is gnome pretty much as the developers intended the thing is though the developers and designers of the gnome desktop have declared that it should be pronounced gnome and there's actually a good reason for that that i won't get into but i just have a habit of calling it gnome with a silent g which is technically the proper english way to pronounce it but i just wanted to let you guys know that the gnome desktop is actually supposed to be pronounced gnome so if you hear someone pronouncing it that way you won't be surprised but anyway enough about that the gnome desktop is a very divisive desktop some people really love it including myself it's my favorite desktop environment on linux it's what i use on all of my computers but other people they don't like it so much because this is not a traditional desktop environment it's actually quite unique in how you use it on your screen right now you are seeing the default gnome desktop and it looks kind of empty doesn't it there's no icons anywhere on the desktop at all and we have this black panel up here at the top and that's about it and the reason for that is because the gnome desktop wants to stay out of the way and actually put all of the focus on the applications that you're running if you click on activities for example and you can get to the same screen by simply pressing the super aka windows key on your keyboard we have a panel here on the left that's not normally visible and what you are seeing here is a combination of favorite applications and then it also shows the applications that are running as well for example the file manager we have a little dot underneath it and that's how you know that an application is actually running so for example if i was to click on photos i don't have any photos but you'll get the idea and then i go back here to activities we have the dot right here but i've mentioned that the files application is running but you don't see it on the screen and the reason for that is because i have it on a different workspace gnome is highly workspace centric in fact it has what's called dynamic workspaces workspaces are essentially having separate desktops and as you can see here i can click on each one of these three this one i have several applications running here and then i have photos which i've just opened and then i have this empty desktop here and what i mean by dynamic workspaces is that it always makes sure that you have an empty workspace to use at all times most desktop environments with linux actually have you set a preset number of workspaces that you want but gnome just basically adds or removes desktops as needed as you open and close applications so for example if i open up firefox and then i go back to activities you can see that a fourth desktop has been added that is empty and then what i could do is switch to that one and open gnome software for example and now i have another empty desktop if i close one of these applications for example just get rid of this one you can see that one of the desktops went away so now you could probably see what i mean by dynamic workspaces and it also features great keyboard shortcuts as well so for example if i hold down super and then i press page up i go up one desktop and then similarly if i hold super and press the page down key i go down a desktop up here on the top right corner we have our system controls for example our volume brightness the wi-fi network that we're connected to the ability to add bluetooth devices to the system we see more information about our battery right here and then we also have quick access to settings and as you can see it's a very straightforward desktop the downside to gnome is that you don't have much in the way of customization yes you can customize it quite a bit you can even use extensions although i generally don't because i find that extensions can sometimes make the gnome desktop a bit unstable though a few extensions won't hurt anyone i generally stay away from them because for me the gnome desktop works fine for me as is with no changes gnome is basically for those of you out there that want a default desktop environment and when i say default gnome is essentially the default linux desktop environment it's installed on many distributions but to be fair default in linux only means it's a suggestion you can install whatever desktop environment you want but it's as close to a standard in linux as we currently have if you want more customization than gnome provides then other desktop environments which we'll be getting to use shortly will give you a greater level of customization than gnome does so choose accordingly so if you don't really care about customization as much and you just want something simple to get you going then gnome is great for you but if you actually have a focus on customization then you might want to look at one of the other desktops that we'll be getting too shortly overall though gnome is a great desktop it's not your typical desktop as you can see the interface is quite unique so it's not for everyone but i do recommend that you at least give it a shot anyway let's go ahead and check out another desktop environment so here i am with the plasma desktop which i sometimes refer to as kde which is essentially its old name it's a long story old habits die hard so i will use kde and plasma interchangeably and actually a lot of other people do too because for those of us that have been using linux for a long time like me shedding the old name from our memory is kind of hard to do the plasma desktop overall is highly customizable and it runs very fast it's a good choice for medium tier computers and even the lower tier computers out there because it's just very responsive and it runs efficiently and the layout is similar to windows in the sense that you have a start menu equivalent here on the bottom left hand side of the screen and then on the right hand side you have status bar icons right here that give you the status of various apps that are running in the background now in my end you might notice some inconsistency when it comes to the icon sizes on the screen right now because i had to make some adjustments for the screen recorder to work with this desktop environment on a 4k screen probably not something that you'll run into but if anything looks hard to see that's probably why so anyway what i'm going to do is launch the file manager here the file manager and plasma is referred to as dolphin interesting name but it is a great file manager it gives you all of the options that you would expect to have in a file manager for example i can activate other view modes here as you can see to customize how things are presented in the window as you can see here i have firefox and firefox is not a native plasma application but it does look fine even if an application is not designed for the plasma desktop plasma still has a way that makes non-native applications look right at home and just like a majority of the desktop environments out there i can minimize the window you can see that it minimizes into the application icon down here at the bottom and then i can launch new applications by going here to my favorites list or i could go here to the applications tab to launch any application that i might have installed on my system i could basically just browse through the various categories here and you can see that the desktop environment is very easy to use and in my opinion the plasma desktop has more customization options than any other desktop environment that you can possibly download i'm not going to be able to show you all of the ways that you can customize it here but as a quick example if i right click the panel here i can edit the panel i can change the height and so far nothing out of the ordinary here because you can adjust that in most of the desktop environments but when it comes to options we just have a bunch as you can see here i could customize how the panel is displayed and i can also add new widgets to the panel as well and even the screen i can add an analog clock here application dashboard i can even add an application launcher to the desktop which is kind of crazy but you can do it and the widgets that you can add will either work better on the panel or on the desktop and some of them work well on both but plasma doesn't hold your hand at all and if you want to put something on the desktop that's actually meant for the panel well they won't stop you they'll let you do whatever you want an example of that is i have this bluetooth icon right here i can drag this right onto the panel and here it is on the panel so now i have something to click on if i want a dedicated place to add or join new bluetooth devices to my system as you can see here i can easily add a new device similar to that i can add that same bluetooth icon here to the desktop and like this application launcher app right here it's kind of weird to have it on the desktop but again you can if you decide to check out the plasma desktop on your distribution of choice i highly recommend you just browse around the settings and see what you can do with the customization if you can think it chances are you could probably do it [Music] so now i am logged into the xfce desktop environment which is actually one of my favorites when it comes to the more lighter weight desktop environments that you would use on older computers but then again lightweight desktop environments work especially well on newer computers with faster hardware and faster processors as well and xfce has been around for a very long time although xfce is a traditional desktop environment basically it has panels a minimize button and so on the defaults of the desktop put the panel on the top of the screen rather than on the bottom so for example we have the application launcher right here and then if i open up the file manager for example you'll notice that there's an icon here for the file manager because basically when you open applications you have a tile here on the top for that application which is very similar to the older style of the windows taskbar from back in the day before windows switched to the icon only view but it's at the top of the screen just like most desktop environments you have multiple workspaces one of my favorite features we have a system tray here on the right but when it comes to the layout in xfce the default layout is just a suggestion you don't actually have to have this panel here at the top and you don't even have to have a panel here at the bottom now essentially this panel at the bottom is just a place to put some icons for applications that you use frequently but again it's just a suggestion so for example i can actually go here to the panel menu and go to panel preferences i could change it to a vertical panel for example i get all kinds of options and if i unlock it i can just drag it over here to the left hand side if i want it to be over there instead basically i can customize the panels any way i'd like and similarly i could select panel one the top panel can unlock that as well and i could just drag it all the way down here to the bottom and now i have the panel in the traditional place at the bottom of the screen i could even configure a panel on each side of the screen all the way around the edges of the screen if i wanted to there's a lot of customization that you can do here but aside from all the customization that you get it's a full-featured desktop environment it's very fast and i like it a lot we have all of the things that we would expect to have in a traditional desktop environment such as system tray icons i've already mentioned the tiles here for the running applications we have a full application menu with categories that we can go through to look at all of the applications that are on the system so it's very easy to use and if you are looking for a desktop environment that runs well on older and newer computers alike then i highly recommend you give xfce a try [Music] here on your screen right now is the cinnamon desktop environment running on fedora if you've ever used the cinnamon edition of mint you'll notice that this looks actually quite different there's different branding here but it's essentially the same desktop the cinnamon desktop environment is made specifically for linux mint that's what made it famous and those are the majority of the developers that work on it but just like with all things linux even if something is designated for a particular platform there's nothing stopping us from actually grabbing that and installing it wherever we'd like and fedora makes cinnamon available to their users just like debian does and a few other distributions as well so you don't actually have to run linux mint in order to enjoy cinnamon but given that it's made specifically for mint you'll probably have the best experience on linux mint but again you can install it on whatever distribution you'd like and here it is on fedora cinnamon is basically a traditional desktop environment the application launcher is located on the bottom left-hand corner of the screen and we get various categories just like with most application launchers nowadays where you can basically go through and select a category by just hovering over it and then once you've selected the category you just go over here and launch the application that you're looking for so you know here's firefox and down here at the bottom you can see that we have the application icon right here and if i launch another application you can see that it opens up in place we don't get a new icon just like with windows the application launcher icons down here on the panel double as the actual tiles for open applications as well and then by hovering your mouse cursor over a running application you can see a little preview window here that gives you an idea of what's actually on that application on the right hand side we have all the usual controls for example wi-fi battery and other applications that are running in the background so traditionally cinnamon is very easy to use and probably a great choice for someone that has a mid-tier computer and is looking for a more hand-holding experience or an easier to use interface although i have seen many professional linux users use the cinnamon desktop environment as well so it aims to be a great desktop environment for well virtually everyone definitely give cinnamon a try there's a number of distributions that actually offer this for example linux mint that's the distro that's made it famous but also here on fedora as well as debian and some others as well if what you see on the screen right now is appealing to you then this is definitely worth a look so there you go that was an overview of the more common and popular desktop environments available for linux let me know in the comments below which one your favorite is and then stay tuned and subscribe if you haven't already done so because once you do you will get a notification as soon as the next episode is available in this series if it isn't already and then once that's uploaded i'll see you there thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: LearnLinuxTV

Views: 37,161

Keywords: Linux, Tutorial, Review, Howto, Guide, Distribution, Distro, Learn Linux, operating system, os, open-source, open source, gnu/linux, LearnLinuxTV, LearnLinux.tv, homelab, how to homelab, desktop environment, gnome, lxce, linux desktop, kde, plasma, cinnamon, cinnamon desktop, mint, ubuntu, fedora, desktop environment (software genre), linux desktop environment, best linux desktop environment, cinnamon desktop environment, gnome 3, linux distributions, linux tutorial for beginners, laptop, desktop

Id: IiOt4waFqhQ

Length: 21min 52sec (1312 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 13 2021