I've been using xfce for months, and just switched to gnome 3.
I used to hate gnome.

But oh my god, it's so much better. There's so many annoying details about xfce that gnome does right.

@Nato can your cheeky ass elaborate on that so I can change my mind if I'm wrong?

@Nato wow, way to waste my time, thanks bud

@Nato welcome to devrant i guess...

It's been a lot of years, but I used to observe a 25-40% drop in framerates in games when I switched to gnome/cinnamon/kde from something else. Are they no longer as expensive as they were?

@bahua I think not, just ran a very expensive game and not seeing any difference than with xfce.

cpu usage in idle is always below 1, ram usage is like 300 mb...

@Nato gg? take your cancerous twitch culture elsewhere kid

Dunno, tried Gnome3 a while back, and I really hated it. It's not very customizable at all. I mean seriously, something as simple as putting icons on your desktop!? Can't do that apparently. And the bloat it brings with it.. awful. Not worth it. Gnome2 aka Mate was and is good, but with Gnome3 they just went completely down the shitter IMO.

@Condor interesting... I can't even remember why I hated old gnome.

what is/are your favorite one(s)?

I enjoyed switching from xfce because of some issues, like

* alt tab has a horrible delay, something you wouldn't expect from one of the most lightweight DEs.
* some windows just freezing and xkill not killing them
* clicking links from certain applications has a long delay
* the default icons felt terrible
* hibernation or suspension on certain thresholds never worked for me (I'm not sure if that's xfce's job though, I'm on manjaro)
* some notifications didn't work on xfce, but on gnome they worked out of the box, like zsh notifications
* picking a default browser was pretty much one click here, on xfce I had to tweak configs.

and some others.

@erandria dunno, never had much of an issue with those.. default icons are often shit though. Somehow Linux distros still don't always do that right, and desktop environments.. let's just say that Adwaita looks like it came straight from the early 2000's. Here I'm using Paper, I really like its material design.

Had some issues with XFCE and Mate as well though.. mostly that in XFCE there's no easy way to get connections to network shares on the desktop (default on Mate I think), while on Mate I'm unable to use my Bluetooth headset's xf86 buttons properly, which works like a charm in XFCE. If only one of them would take the good stuff from the other without adding a ton of bloat...

@Condor yeah, definitely agree
paper looks nice
what's your favorite DE?

I3wm with arch is way of life ☺️☺️

@bugwriter I used i3 for a while, it was enjoyable in some sense, but more annoying than enjoyable for me unfortunately...

I might give it a retry at some point...

@bahua yes, it is still there in gnome

@erandria Mate by all means 🥰 for me at least it strikes that perfect balance between OOTB appeal, required reconfiguration to make it look awesome, and configurability. Lack of xf86 control was a small price to pay - and it's not like I use my laptop that often to listen to music or watch videos anyway.

@Condor I'll retry mate then...

@erandria annoying because? Takes time to setup or something else? I would like to know :3

@bugwriter I specified such annoyances in a comment above