Desktop Environments and Distributions

What is a Desktop Environment? Tools, window managers, login managers, display managers, all of the components What is a distribution? When I say Linux, I don't mean the kernel, I mean the operating system running on top of it.

Gnome, Gnome 3, Gnome Shell GTK, Wayland, X11

Mac-like + Hot corners + Suite of extensions + Themes + Snappy - Hard set to 60hz - Poor multimonitor support

KDE Qt, Basic Wayland, X11

Windows-like + Start Menu + Pinned applications + Theme store + A lot out of the box + Really smooth composite manager - Hidden WiFi quirks - Weird display settings quirks

XFCE GTK, X11

Mac-like Windows-like It just depends - Very basic out of the box - Toolbar needs some work + Extremely customizable + Launcher or Start Menu + Versatile Themes - Multimonitor support was not great

Cinnamon GTK, X11

Windows-like + Start Menu + Aesthetically pleasing - Trouble with multimonitor and discrete GPU + Customizable

MATE GTK, X11

Mac-like + Status in top + Launcher in the bottom +/- Interesting composite manager +/- GPU +/- CPU +/- Other (CPU) + Lightweight environment ++ Very nice community

Ubuntu + Tons of support + Most widely used + Fast + Long support window + Optimal for games + Huge repository +/- Based on Debian Testing - Dramatic changes - Non-LTS unstable - Inconsistent drivers and driver support

Fedora + Great community + Enterprise development + Leading edge + Have yum and rpm available + Great support and development - Enjoy patching - Questionable release cycle - Lack of options

Debian + Incredibly stable + Perfect for prod + Secure + Massive repository selection - Not as sophisticated out of the box (no sudo, for example) - Unknown release cycle - Behind other distributions

Linux Mint + Tons of support out of the box + Based on Ubuntu + Stable + GUI options - Sketchy past - Green Theme

openSUSE + Great community + Great support and drivers + KDE Champion + Stable or Rolling Release + RPM, packman, zypper - Limited selection - Tough to find information

Arch Linux + Simple + Great support and documentation + (B)Leeding Edge (Stable upstream) + Versatile - Manual installation - Frequent updates - Questionable reliability