After trying Debian (Bookworm & Trixie) on the desktop for a few months, I'm now taking Fedora (Workstation) out for a spin to see which I prefer.
Although, regardless of what I choose for desktop, I'm almost certainly going to stick with Debian for servers as I like the stability and simplicity.
I've found #debian #bookworm with the #xfce desktop to be incredibly stable. Uptime in the months, it has been my main 24/7 desktop.
I have moved to #trixie now that it's 'almost here' and am trialling the #kde desktop. Whilst it looks good and is performant, the stability of #plasma6 isn't there yet, some features are not yet available that were in qt5, and I've had a couple of widgets crash.
I've also noted a few of the apps I ran in #bookworm are not available in #trixie, so I may need to look into more #docker images to run those.
The #avidemux app will not compile against #qt6 on #trixie for some reason, so I've had to compile that against #qt5, where it seems to work fine. Need this as #dvbcut is one of the apps I use that is not available in #trixie
Overall, #trixie is looking to be a stable release. I'm just not convinced I'll stay with #kde and may revert to #xfce again, or perhaps try the #CinnamonDesktop again.
One of the challenges with #debian #stable is that the DE will be static for its lifetime. With #kde and #trixie, that is mostly 6.3.5 and 25.04 for the various elements and framework.
This may become an issue over the lifetime of #trixie, as #kde development happens pretty fast.
I like #CinnamonDesktop quite a lot, but do find it a tad slower than other DEs on the same hardware. Plus I struggle with the file manager, Nemo, being very slow with lots of files and also occasionally messing up the columns.
No environment is perfect. You just need to find the one that ticks most of the boxes, and provides you something that doesn't impact your workflow too much. At the end of the day we're supposed to use our computers to do stuff, not mess about with different distros and DEs :)
I will give #kde at least a week of real usage, and see how I feel at the end of it.
Cam
Bryan (he/him) 🇺🇸 🏳️🌈
Mason Pines