My personal favorite is the LXDE / Lubuntu 16.04 setup.
All my subjective opinion, of course:
- Sits in the sweet spot for bare bones distro vs batteries included.
- Without decorations, I have essentially borderless applications, that I can quickly toggle the titlebars etc.
- Kept sane keyboard shortcuts and did not remove them for some arbitrary reasons. Here's a random nitpick, why do some interfaces no longer allow you to press a single letter on the keyboard to launch an option from a menu, example: An option from the list of options in the File menu?
- Very fast, allows a great battery life, all of ubuntu packages and ubuntu community support/troubleshooting, very easy to customize if you need to.
I love it because it is an OS that stays out of my way, has a sane setup out of the box and looks awesome with the borderless windows.
It is perfect in almost every way! I'm worried about their plans to switch to LXQt. It's almost like how Ubuntu 10.10 was IMHO, the pinnacle of perfection, sane choices etc, and then they decide to start all over again.
Only thing I dislike about Lubuntu is losing Mac keyboard shortcuts and hardware, a lot of them I managed to replicate and even found a (slightly unstable) Alfred alternative called Albert [1]. My Magic Mouse 2 could only work like a dumb mouse.
I turned off the tray at the bottom, the window borders and set apps to start full screen, switching between full screen apps was much nicer than what remains after Apple closed off whatever Total Spaces was using. It ended up being a really productive way to work due to the lack of distraction like crap software from Apple, Adobe, 1Password, iTerm etc endlessly begging for 5 minutes so you can watch their updates download. Or all the other notifications that mostly don't need to be read or exist.
That's probably my favorite thing about Macs. The unix/emacs-like keybindings like C-f, C-b, C-n, C-p to move the cursor, C-c to kill a process in the terminal, etc and the Windows-like keybindings like ⌘-c, ⌘-v, ⌘-x for copy, paste, cut, ⌘-n for new window, etc both exist by default without colliding. I can get this on Linux if I spend a week remapping things but not by default. As far as I can tell, there's no way to get this on Windows.
The Unix/emacs-like keybindings are great, aren't they? They're included in the default bindings of the Cocoa text system, and, though I wasn't able to find references to it in the limited searching I did, it's not so surprising given that OS X comes from NeXTSTEP which was a Unix-based system. I did find that you can change these keybindings as well.[0][1] Pretty, cool, eh?
Minor pendantic nit: ⌘-C, ⌘-V, ⌘-X originate with Apple, so referring to them as "Windows-like" is backwards.[2] Like I said, minor, eh? Normally I'd suggest alternative wording in the interest of providing constructive criticism, but I'm too lazy to do so right now, so feel free to disregard :)
> My Magic Mouse 2 could only work like a dumb mouse
Last I checked, I thought I saw this was a driver issue, not a DE one? I could be wrong, but I remember coming to the conclusion that it wouldn't work as anything but a dumb mouse at all on Linux (at least, for the time being)
My understanding is that LXDE does not support HiDPI very well because not everything is ported to gtk3. Do you have any experience to share with retina/3K/4K displays and LXDE?
My personal favorite is the LXDE / Lubuntu 16.04 setup.
All my subjective opinion, of course:
- Sits in the sweet spot for bare bones distro vs batteries included.
- Without decorations, I have essentially borderless applications, that I can quickly toggle the titlebars etc.
- Kept sane keyboard shortcuts and did not remove them for some arbitrary reasons. Here's a random nitpick, why do some interfaces no longer allow you to press a single letter on the keyboard to launch an option from a menu, example: An option from the list of options in the File menu?
- Very fast, allows a great battery life, all of ubuntu packages and ubuntu community support/troubleshooting, very easy to customize if you need to.
I love it because it is an OS that stays out of my way, has a sane setup out of the box and looks awesome with the borderless windows.
It is perfect in almost every way! I'm worried about their plans to switch to LXQt. It's almost like how Ubuntu 10.10 was IMHO, the pinnacle of perfection, sane choices etc, and then they decide to start all over again.