Which flavor of operating system does everyone here use?

[JesseRaymondBassett]

I personally love the Cinnamon theme. I am using it on my primary system, which is OpenSusE.

 

[Anthony2019]

I personally love the Cinnamon theme. I am using it on my primary system, which is OpenSusE.

OpenSuse is a very good system. Tumbleweed is excellent if you want a good rolling release system. And YAST tool is one of the very best!

 

[chevyontheriver]

When Gnome 3 was introduced for the first time, back in 2011, it looked absolutely dreadful and it is no wonder that its lack of features and functionality left many users feeling frustrated and alienated. I remember the advertising campaign "getting things done" - but the reality was that very little could be done because the features to do anything had been removed!
But the Gnome OS has moved on and evolved since then.
The changes back in 2011 were very controversial, but in a way they were inevitable. As mobile computing became increasingly popular, with more people doing work "on the go" - on laptops, tablets and touchscreen devices, the OS had to adapt to new ways of working. Gnome 2 was hugely successful and I often wondered why there was a need to "reinvent the wheel" with Gnome 3.
But now I can see why. At home I have both a desktop PC and a touchscreen laptop. The majority of my daily computing tasks are done on my laptop and I think that is true for most people. Sometimes I use a mouse or the touch pad, but sometimes it is much quicker, easier and feels more natural to touch and swipe the screen using finger gestures. Try doing that with Cinnamon, KDE, Mate, XFCE - and I think you will soon find yourself pulling your hair out!
The traditional "desktop metaphor" of having multiple open windows, endless rows of icons and shortcuts displayed on the screen, crowded panels and complex nested menus - all driven by the use of a mouse. That was great back in the 1990s when our computers were mainly stationary, located in rooms and offices, connected directly to modems and printers. But this is 2021 and how times have changed! These days we do computing "on the go" and how this has revolutionised the way we do things.

I see your point. And yet I got used to the desktop on my Macs and found Gnome 2 to be a most sensible continuation of that conceptualization. Gnome 3 threw me. Gnome 4 is better for me but still I'm not loving it.

One reason the change to Gnome 3 was necessary was the ancient code base for Gnome 2. It needed to be cleaned up badly. In that degree it was a success. And, as you mention, it works better for phones and tablets. It just worked poorly for me. Fedora is great, and I have explored other desktop environments. On older hardware I like XFCE a lot.

 

[elytron]

I personally love the Cinnamon theme. I am using it on my primary system, which is OpenSusE.

I also like and prefer the traditional style of desktop layout. My laptop doesn't have a touch screen, and I usually use a wireless mouse. Is why I also like Cinnamon. Have used it with Linux Mint for a long time.

Right now I am into Manjaro Gnome, with the layout switcher to customize. For a similar traditional desktop theme.

 

[Anthony2019]

I see your point. And yet I got used to the desktop on my Macs and found Gnome 2 to be a most sensible continuation of that conceptualization. Gnome 3 threw me. Gnome 4 is better for me but still I'm not loving it.

One reason the change to Gnome 3 was necessary was the ancient code base for Gnome 2. It needed to be cleaned up badly. In that degree it was a success. And, as you mention, it works better for phones and tablets. It just worked poorly for me. Fedora is great, and I have explored other desktop environments. On older hardware I like XFCE a lot.

XFCE is great for older spec hardware. I tried it on my Raspberry PI once and it performed very well. These days, I've replaced the OS on my Raspberry PI with RISC OS which always makes me feel very nostalgic!

Here's a picture of my Raspberry Pi - which is a computer the size of a pack of playing cards!

 

[Sketcher]

OpenSuse is a very good system. Tumbleweed is excellent if you want a good rolling release system. And YAST tool is one of the very best!

I spent a lot of time on OpenSUSE when I was seriously learning Linux for the first time. I liked it, but switched away because other distros better met my needs.

I recently tried Leap and the net install disappointed me greatly - there were repo problems during the installation process, which to me is unacceptable for a production distribution. The full DVD did not have these problems, but it still left a bad taste in my mouth. Very disappointed.