so i installed a BUNCH of desktop environments today.. gnome, kde4, xfce4, lxde, lxqt, elightenment, icewm, and a few other window managers and i must say out of all of them, the one i absolutely HATED the most was KDE4, i forgot why i hated KDE4 from when i used it before and now i remember, those applets are really, really stupid..

surprisingly though i actually liked the look and feel of the gnome 3 desktop, vastly different from any desktop operating system ive used, but not in a bad way in my opion.. if youre expecting a conventional desktop, and you want a conventional desktop, you'll hate it, however as a PC primarily hooked up to my living room television, and reminding me of an android or console interface seemed to fit the whole gaming PC idea fairly well, i could imagine connecting a wiimote to it with a USB powered sensor bar to navigate the DE especially with the clock to scroll configuration it uses (like a mobile device)

other than that, LXDE seemed like plain old LXDE which quite frankly they use a sucky theme, they need to improve the default theme but with some work, it could look pretty cool.. i did however feel that lxqt has a slightly better look and feel and a bit more responsiveness, however it lacked some of the configuration options of LXDE, such as being able to auto-hide panels which i like to set up in corners or along edges, hidden until i move my mouse to the position to open.. find it much easier than using a start menu for launching applications

none of the window managers really had the look and feel i was going for, fluxbox comes pretty close but having some REAL compositing to show some eye candy does aid in its ability to show people its actually a MORE mature, MORE advanced system than windows or mac, so im avoiding window managers for this

xfce was fine, but meh, it didnt REALLY have anything LMQT/DE didnt

that said, ive narrowed down the choices to gnome 3, or one of the LX versions, probably LMDE until LXQt can mature a bit more, but im kind of liking the idea of controlling gnome3 with a wiimote for navigation, with a good onscreen keyboard so i wont really need a wireless mouse and keyboard to use it from my sofa.. also, with renewed functionality for my netbook, i will be doing web browsing, social networking etc stuff from the netbook, my desktop will be almost entirely gaming and i will probably be using a lot of steam big picture mode as well.. all built on top of archlinux

hmm.. seems i completely broke my arch system screwing around.. but anyway, im still trying out different distros to find what i like and i noticed that AUR isnt as up to date as i would like it to be, catalyst drivers are older versions and wont even install with archs new versions of xorg.. annoying quite frankly, but anyway, still browsing around distrowatch i found this other distro that seems pretty interesting called sparkylinux game over edition, anyone familiar with this? it looks interesting (of course i could EASILY achieve the same thing with debian myself) but i do like its default setup and themes of sparky game over edition

I'm not a fan of spin-off distributions for use in the long term (things like Puppy and Kali being more focused) su I would tend towards keeping it Debian. It also helps if you do have issues that the people helping know which packages you have installed.
I you haven't already though you ought to try this site's favourite distribution, Slackware. Like Arch it means reading a bit to get it working but it's a fine distro.

slackware, believe it or not, was actually the first distribution i actually successfully used and stuck with for any period of time, this was before ubuntu, fedora, etc.. i havent used it in like 10 years and ive thought about giving it another try and see whats new

fairly certain im going to stick with xfce though, didnt like the lack of customization of gnome, lack of themes for lxde, or built in compositors as i wanted the ability to really customize my own look and feel, i will probably go with XFCE as it has a huge backing, tons of themes available, can easily plug in compositors and really personalize what it looks like with a lot of plugins i can put in the panel as well while being all not that much heavier than lxde

i think im going to give slackware a try before bouncing around to something else

i tried slackware again, remembered why i stopped using it, either you have a bunch of applications serving the same purpose, multiple desktop environments and all their apps, or you take a really long time nit-picking through the selections to unselect the stuff you dont need.. thats my only gripe with slackware, id much prefer it if they separated single desktop, single app for any given function into individual ISOs rather than jamming them all into one

anyway, dissatisfied with the lack of options and the lameness of more recent gnome apps (like gedit, nautilus, etc) and my sort of epiphany that desktop icons are in reality absolutely useless, offering absolutely no functionality that couldnt be provided in another way, ive decided id start building my own desktop environment based on slack, somewhat resembling the gnome interface but id like to put maybe a 3x3 or 4x4 grid of applications on a hidden dock in one corner, hover the mouse over one of the screen edges for a list of open windows, and another hidden dock for the most basic functionality (web browser, file manager, terminal, etc) and essentially omit the whole desktop icon and taskbar status quo entirely

though i must admit, my urge to continue distro-hopping hasnt subsided yet, i think im fairly comfortable on archlinux for now, however the fact ive been using linux for 10 years now and have yet to try an RPM based distro or linux-from-scratch is giving me the urge to do these things, but i have other hard drives i can use for such experiments

Seems like you have been a busy bloke!!!

quite, i even set up live wallpapers using kwinwrap for more eye candy, going to do what im doing to build my own desktop environment with openbox but place the same panels/docks possibly on top of a compiz or kwin window manager for compositing, if i could get kwin alone without needing a bunch of KDE bullcrap with it, i could make my own aesthetically pleasing Qt based compositing desktop environment that wasnt KDE4

had to edit to delete my old post, i was looking for assistance getting it set up the way i wanted, but HUGE bonus points to xfce customizability, i have a jet black bar at the top with the time in the middle, logout/shutdown stuff to the right, might put taskbar stuff to the left (or reverse those two).. even got a hidden taskbar on the left in the same position as with gnome, and if i hover over the bottom left corner i get all my application launchers... so with xfce i was able to set up my desktop EXACTLY how i wanted it

this will definitely be my go-to desktop environment from now on

Slackware does have a few spinoffs that might be up your ally like SalixOS if you like simplification.

Slackware does have a new utility add-on as of recent called slackpkg+ to extend the package repo listing a bit better. There's also sbotools which turn SlackBuilds.org into a Funtoo or CRUX like portage/ports system.

However, the multiple applications problem is rather fickle on large disk volumes any more and having a few text editors for various purposes does go unnoticed at times. It's still a very stable system, even in -Current.

As far as gaming, there are packages for multilib, Steam, and others available, plus Wine now has some better levels of support through the nine extention in MesaLib (32-bit mostly) so gaming via Wine is slowly improving, though it still lacks any level of supporting Ring 0 level applications even emulated and sandboxed, and probably never will, so online gaming with anti-cheating is probably still out of the question.

i may give salix a try, but i dont know, it seems like quite a headache to do everything from slack builds and source, having to find dependencies and sometimes there are a TON of dependencies for a given package.. i should probably focus on something that has a package manager like pacman and focus on learning how to take source packages to make build scripts for them

i think my distro hopping is going to take me to something with yum/rpm package management as i have yet to ever use one, i know a lot already about the deb and pacman stuff, a little bit about gentoos portage (do people still even use gentoo? it seems to have really dropped in popularity) and ive never used a yum/rpm system yet.. does anyone make a yum/rpm distro thats not bloated, that i can install to a command line and use a package manager to go from there?

sbotools might be a good tool for you. It does require some manual work, but it fairly much automates resolving dependencies for a complete Slackware installation that already tries to resolve all necessary dependencies for you.

While being a "hands-on" distribution, Slackware does give you more control of your system in the end, and after you fairly much work with stuff enough, you can craft a few scripts to suit your own needs, set up cronjobs, and such.

I, personally, have Slackware running with a Pure64 build strategy with sbotools to manage add-ons, OpenRC to manage the boot process, and a list of automated scripts ran at boot and cronjobs to handle everything else. All I have to do anymore is just log in and do my daily work, and then logout and shutdown when completed. I do have a few custom packages, granted, but for the most part, my system is nearly all hands-off, but I made it that way.

As far as popular, I look for functionality, stability, user friendliness, and customization friendliness rather than follow trends and popularity distributions. I've used box brand distros before, and after enough time, I stopped wanting another Windows wanna-be.

well there are certainly a lot of windows wannabes, and i dont mean distros that make things easier or more automated for the user, thats any operating system that wants people, and unless you like having almost no third party software report you want as many people using it as you can get, but i do no a lot of windows status quos getting implemented more so on a desktop environment level than distro in an attempt to make things more "windows" like, with a taskbar, system tray, start menu and nothing else.. ive set up my desktop completely different from windows or mac and i must say i really like it, in fact, its making me realize how useless desktop icons actually are when you have something better

as far as slack goes, i dont think ill get back into it, i fielded it once before (slack 10.1 and 10.2) with success and having to compile everything from source packages isnt why i left it, i just felt the distro was over cluttered and "messy" in terms of having a bunch of redundent software i didnt really need or want with no simple way of removing it.. i actually feel more in control with whats on my system when i have a means to easily add or remove what i want and in my opinion the capabilities of some of the package managers out there, the ability to not need to hunt down packages and dependencies (like you do in windows) is what has made linux an absolutely superior system for all people, beginners or advanced

also, ive heard people from slackware say "i like to know what im installing" or "i like to control what goes into my system", however any package management system ive used has clearly shown you exactly whats about to be installed before they install it

unfortunately right now im having a lot of graphical glitches going on, TTYs all blank, font distorted, streaks of colors bleeding off of windows as i move them and the system says the AMD catalyst drivers are properly installed (though had to install them from AUR and theyre a bit oudated), im thinking i could really be forced onto a distro that is better supported by steam, and my graphics (AMD HD7950)

yeah, with the problems i was having with getting catalyst drivers to work on arch, as well as sound system issues and steam/AMD software being unsupported, circumstances have dictated my gaming PC will probably have to remain on debian.. so im running straight debian testing right now and this is where my gaming PC will stay

as for my look and feel i managed to get xfces panel to function EXACTLY like gnomes top panel with some changes of my own.. jet black background, white font as if the wallpaper just simply cuts off.. i got the clock to remain dead center, tried to use spacers but when new apps would be added to the taskbar the clock would shift, so put three oanels on top so the one with the clock could be perfectly centered at all times, and since i was using a jet black background anyway they all blended together seemlessly as one long one.. i like it a lot, i really do, my open windows display as small system tray size icons at the top left opposite the system tray

but yeah, its a shame no matter how hard id try to get arch working there were just too many small bugs in it and i got tired of dealing with it.. in the same areas, the same applications for debian seem largely bug-free (probably because the software i need is better supported on this system maybe?).. and though i will miss the AUR, this will give me an opportunity to learn how to build my own packages based on source files instead so i wont NEED any kind of user repositories to get what i need

for a gaming PC.. im trying to decide to go with pulseaudio, alsa, or jack, i think latency is more important, so eliminate pulseaudio and probably stick with jack or alsa

Pulseaudio works fine for me.