when it comes to Linux the desktop environment is probably the most important thing because that's kind of the look and feel it comes with a set of system tools to like change your resolution than other things so let's actually put these on a tier list and desktop environments are a little bit weird because most of these teams are only a handful of people there's almost some of them are only one person you know it just depends on the desktop environment so instead of your you know Windows or Mac OS that has hundreds of people if not thousands and tons of quality assurance you really have these small teams making the GUI that you see in almost every Linux distribution so let's uh rank them today and we'll just start just jump right into it and start with cinnamon Cinnamon's actually great for a new user I'd put it in you know a lot of people love it but I put it in a pretty good category it looks like this on Linux Mint uh the mint Team makes it it uh Clem I think is one of their lead devs and just amazing uh tool set probably the most polished out of all the desktop environments the only down thing I'd say about cinnamon is uh I don't like uh it doesn't have a whole bunch of functions and and sometimes I find myself going I wish it was a little bit more customizable where you'll find a lot of these other ones are but at this end of the day it's very polished probably the most polished and I love it for new users that's why I usually recommend Linux Mint now next up is going to be deepened deep in is an interesting one I haven't used it for like a whole bunch of times but I I kind of want to put it in the average to pretty good category almost in between these it does a great job with scaling it looks beautiful like it does a great job so I I do like it for that however it is more of an odd ball out of these not very many people use deep in but at the same time it is pretty gorgeous and I haven't had any issues with it uh now is Elementary um it feels like a bad Mac clone uh it's actually Pantheon is the desktop environment Elementary OS I think is the only one that comes with it built in there's probably a couple other spins that have Elementary for Mac users coming to Linux uh if if that is actually even a thing but I I don't know every time I get on Pantheon I'm like ooh this feels dirty and I don't like it and that's the pantheon desktop environment it's it's not necessarily bad by anything other than I just don't personally from my personal opinion like the look and feel but then again I don't like the look and feel of a Mac so I think if you do uh this would score higher in your list next ups lxde I don't think this is really used anymore it's deprecated uh I put it average it's a lightweight desktop environment it's good but not really that sexy it's pretty Bare Bones and in that same realm lxqt is uh the newer version of it so to speak much of the same here it's great for light weight I think it runs on like 100 or 200 Megs of memory uh I think lxd is a little bit lighter weight than lxqt but not by much they're both very lightweight and a great desktop environments uh for minimal systems like netbooks and you know if you want to throw it on it to pay a potato these are usually what you use and then we have budgie uh budgies uh Solas I put it in a pretty good category I was always really impressed with this very polished a great desktop environment not one I've really run for any exterior extended period of time but I did find like a lot of its option sets and it's just overall really really good I liked it uh and then we have gnome ugh gnome some people would put it right here like some people are like gnome Fanatics I hate gnome though I put it in the dog water category uh for my personal opinion and I do that not because of functionality the functionality is there with gnome and it's probably again pretty polished the one downside to gnome that I see and where I just can't bring it to put it in any other tier other than dog water is it just installs extensions through the browser and I hate that that can be exploited there's been a actually quite a few exploits for Gnome and using actual extensions through Firefox or a chromium-based browser and you can um exploit it through there in you know a lot of times when you do feature updates to gnome the past extensions then break it's just not a great system I don't like it now if you're a purist and don't need any extensions with gnome and you just love the layout by all means stick with it it's fine for those peers out there I just don't like the standard workflow of gnome and adding extensions with gnome is ugly I really wish they'd change it uh this is cute fish OS never used it so we're just going to toss it down here haven't really even tried it KDE you think I would just drop it into the goat it's probably my favorite desktop environment however I gotta put in a pretty good category because there's bugs with it you know there's a lot of functionality here it's just not quite as polished as I'd say even budgie or cinnamon but man there's a lot of options coming from Windows is by far my favorite desktop environment it feels more like it you can customize almost anything it's great uh and I love it but at the same time I understand it does have a few flaws a little little shortcomings that I don't really run it on a daily basis anymore but I did for a long time and I loved it I had many desktops with KDE still love the KDE team they're just great uh next Up's mate I'm gonna put this in the average realm it it's a little bit lighter weight than KDE or gnome like gnome and Katie are relatively heavy and mate is a little bit lighter it's based on actually gnome 2.0 but it has that old school feel so a lot of vets actually really love mate and uh it's not bad I just put in the average realm next Up's Unity um that's just dog water uh I think it was deprecated for many years and then out of nowhere like version 7 popped up from the community someone picked it up and then resurrected it so hell yeah that's awesome I love to see these old things come back it was actually developed by Ubuntu and I actually didn't mind it uh I liked it actually better than gnome back in the day but uh it being not well supported kind of makes me go on I probably should steer clear this however there is some charm to it I will admit that and then xfce um man if you if you just install stockx FC like this ugh it's ugly it's just average but when you do like a full customization of xfc it's pretty nice I put it in a pretty good tier this is kind of my desktop environment tier list now you might notice I didn't put anything in the top tier what the hell is going on with that and the reason for that being is there's really no desktop environment that I'm like this is perfect this is this is where I want to live for the rest of my life uh there's shortcomings with all of them and uh for me obviously I'm using dwm here which means I don't even use a desktop environment with my Linux as is it's just not something that uh I found someone with enough polish and I was like well I'll just not use it and then just use a window manager like this and then just launch everything with hotkeys and customize and change my system around with just the CLI I'm totally okay with just pulling up a terminal and uh flip it over to a new workspace and just doing it all through a window manager so you know maybe maybe I put some window managers with proper customization in the goat category but there's no desktop environment that just really does it for me these days and that's where I'm going to leave the Linux desktop environment tier list they're all really fun to do I encourage you to check them all out and you can just install you know vanilla Debian and then just install any one of these and they're great uh but again it's just all of them a little bit lacking I still haven't found that perfect system where I'm uh just very satisfied getting close with the more minimal setup I have going on here but uh the desktop environment's a great starting point for those coming to Linux and with that I'll see you in the next one