Ubuntu's Unity on 14.04 was top GUI for me. It worked well at least through 18.04 even after it was no longer the default. I was using a Mac at the time as well, and I have since moved to Mac (still on Catalina ...).

There were no things from the Mac I was missing with Unity. There are still things on the Mac that I miss from Unity (most notably, the multiple dots indicating the number of open windows, and the setting where the screen that does NOT have the default window can be subtly dimmed)

WindowMaker is great if you enjoy the NeXTStep look and feel.

you're not alone in this. On Windows side I tend to tweak as much as I can to get back to WinNT/Classic look. Thanks to XFCE and Win2K theme I can get this done as well, however Microsoft never even consider giving choice to people and ability to replace the UI. Maybe killing explorer.exe and running total commander as primary is something for long term to consider...

Give LXQT a try.

Cinnamon

Best obtained via LMDE

Do you remember the "padding" in Windows 95/2000 UI? THAT'S the kind of padding a desktop interface needs (i.e. minimal to nearly none).

Please keep the useless touch-friendly interface as an optional addition on desktop environments. Better yet, contain it to EXCLUSIVELY for mobile apps/usage because a desktop computing environment should NOT have half the screen full of annoying whitespace! I'm trying to do work and see as much content as possible at once.

macOS Big Sur and above, GNOME3+, and even Windows 11 all have such infuriating interfaces. The frustratingly excessive padding added to the window title bars and context menu take up the whole damn screen!

Maybe on tablets and touchscreen laptops running GNOME or Win11 where you use a stylus for writing/drawing, I can sort of get it.

If you use a keyboard and mouse to do work, however, the context menus should be compact and dense so you don't have to keep scrolling and rearranging your desktop workspace to find and organize things.

To me it looks like sn experiment: how far Fyne can Go? To be honest I am kinda amazed that any GUI framework in Go is so good already that it can be used to build a DE. The screenshots also look very decent, especially compared to earlier attempts to do any GUI in Go that I've seen.

It must be X given that they recommend installing xbacklight, arandr, and Compton alongside it.

Really ? I didn't use Go much but it had by far the shortest compile time of any language I ever used.

The whole desktop compiles here in around 7 seconds for me. First build time will be longer as it must build the dependencies too.

I’ll try and add that mode this weekend to the file manager https://github.com/FyshOS/fyles

Funny thing is it's not even a feature fyndesk can claim. It's flat design, but it's not material design. Not even good design. Fyne's achilles' heel is its lacking aesthetics and it's pervasively non-native feel.

It's a feature of visual design, something that's reasonably important to a desktop environment.

You may not like material design (I personally could take it or leave it), but visual design itself matters.

Totally agree. I tinkered around with an openbox+tint2 setup several years ago and was able to get it to a usable state, but getting all the little things working is so fussy and flaky, with e.g. the need to hunt down suitable daemons to get a typical tray item loadout.

Imagine a perfect world where all the separate apps just were coherent, forming a complete ecosystem and their config files were not disparate? So you would just pick a window manager you somehow like better, a panel app of your choice, launcher, sound volume, WiFi management, calculator applets you prefer... Then switch to another window manager someday... keeping everything else intact. This is the way it's meant to be, every thing you dislike is just a quirk.

Yeah this, there really isn't a strong coherent option for tiling window managers just yet. We'll probably see one soon with cosmic.

I think its the vim effect where the userbase just has a high demand for customization and don't mind a lot more set up and configuration to get there.

Sure, nevertheless having panels as a distinct class of entities seems a rude violation of the Occam's razor principle everyone apparently rushes to do as soon as they write their own. People love panels somehow. The more bells&whistless on them - usually the better. This is just a curious psychological phenomenon.

I quite like how HaikuOS (and maybe BeOS before it, I can't claim familiarity there) handles this. There's one positionable window with a launcher and a barebones customizable set of control widgets. Everything else from system monitors to workspace switching are just normal application windows that you place in a convenient spot and pin so they show up on all workspaces. That combined with the powerful way they handle window management, allowing for creating custom tiled window sets and treating every window as tabbable, highlight just how samey and limiting most desktop environments are. I daily drive sway, which works completely differently, but Haiku's solution is so interesting that I find myself enjoying it despite the mismatch with my usual habits.

Really though, Windows, Gnome, Plasma, MacOS, they're all basically the same and all feel so cumbersome and limiting. Desktop metaphors have been stalled for so long, and when Apple took a shot at something new with Stage Manager they managed to downgrade the experience even further. I'm so disappointed by the state of things.

Bspwm just uses bash for configuration which is about as straight forward as you can get with modularity. Easy though? I dont think modularity is ever easy is it? I think the lack of it is one of the things that makes a thing easy.

To some people that's what StumpWM offers, and easy molding is what attracted me to IceWM back in the day.

I'm more of a 'install i3wm, change a few things in the config, done' kind of person these days.

I guess there are a couple of issues with that:

1. Panels are fixed in place and don't have title bars etc. They're the only window type like that so you'd have to go to extra effort to make a UI to "lock" windows and unlock them or whatever.

2. If you delete the launcher then how do users start apps? Some old DEs let you right click the desktop but that's not very discoverable.

Much easier just to have settings somewhere do let you say which side (if any) you want panels on.

I believe the main issue is that it’s difficult to have any kind of consistent/coherent design in a desktop where everything is optional. Building good UI for managing panels can also be challenging.