It still isn’t. It doesn’t even have fractional scaling

Cinnamon does everything I need it to and I’ve got it customised to the way I like it so I’ve not felt a need to switch. MATE’s status as a fork of an old version of Gnome (at least at the time I was looking) worries me a bit as well because the legacy codebase may get left behind.

I really don’t have a single favorite. I use them in situations where they’re the most suitable for my needs and my personal preferences. I think overall KDE/Plasma is the most versatile and flexible, customizable and theme-able. Pantheon is simple and polished, though you’ve got to install the extensions and tweaks; I really don’t know what the devs think with having no minimize button. It’s like a weird fetish that they force on all new installs. But once you add the extras, it’s a beautiful and simple interface. Bodhi’s Moksha is very weird but has its own charm. Also customizable beyond what most people even would know what to do with, but the thing I like most about the distro on the whole is it will run on lower end systems and yet still offer the kind of GUI that usually demands better resources. None of the others I’ve tried run as smoothly on equivalent low end hardware. So that’s its biggest advantage.

Like I said, each for their own scenario.

yes, and I couldn’t really care what it was intended to be used for. clearly I could still use it as a WiFi utility posts installation.

As per the arch wiki it says “iwd is a wireless dameon for Linux written by Intel.” “The core goal of the project is to optimize resources utilization by not depending on external libraries.”

the point of why I’m using it is for that exact reason. it does the same thing every other WiFi GUI/TUI out there. unless there is a vulnerability/security risk of using iwd, I couldn’t really care less about the other options, even if that means manually configuring enterprise and public networks.

I’d like to compliment on it changing that when you open a full screen app. Yet, these tiny pixels look so little difference that it looks very much off to me indeed. And I’d prefer to have no dock at all. So I use Sway for myself. It’s that I interact with KDE sometimes.

It might not work, yeah. KDE has integrated KWin and Plasma very purposely that I would be impressed if you could implement the one without the other. Not saying it can’t be done, because this is Linux after all, but KDE didn’t design Plasma to be modular software, so I would imagine you’d experience broken integrations and such that “just work” with KWin.

Noctalia is a fork of Quickshell, and it provides a bar, dock, background handling, plugins store, and easy settings menus to adjust everything. It feels nice and polished, and it’s got a lot of “nice to haves” covered. It also works with Sway! The scrolling logic is a Niri thing, so no need to worry about that.

Wallpaper Engine is a tool hosted through Steam that allows people to have animated desktops, sometimes ones that have sound and even interactivity. The problem is that it’s 100% built to work with Windows only. Because it’s changing something on your system and not just drawing things on screen like a game, there’s really no way for Proton or Wine to help.

And that’s what Linux Wallpaper Engine is for! It can take the wallpaper resources and apply them to window managers that support the zwlr_layer_shell protocol, which allows a z-positioning order for the background for Wayland clients. Noctalia has a plugin that makes that integration much easier to manage, so it feels like it’s part of the system rather than a hacky workaround.

Noctalia is a Quickshell fork that’s preconfigured. It’s pretty solid, lightweight, and with the most Niri integration I’ve seen. Comes default in the Cachyos Niri config.