Getting around the desktop
Where you’ll spend most of your time.
We like to work within a pleasant aesthetic, and a clearly laid-out, good-looking interface can pull new users into Linux and make them want to stick with it. Because we’re considering things from a beginner’s perspective, we’re awarding more points to user interfaces that are easily discoverable and that resemble existing interfaces. It might seem unfair that we’re, effectively, punishing innovation this time around.
We’re taking these interfaces as we find them, but in most cases, if there is a feature that you really dislike (placement of panels and so on) you can change it – this is Linux, after all.
These days, we expect an app launcher to pop up via a hotkey and be fully searchable with a search that includes application descriptions, and we are happy to report that this is the case in each of these desktops. These aren’t desktops that target low-spec machines, but on average hardware, we find them all to be snappy in operation.