I haven't installed many themes myself so can't tell exactly regarding your question.


As InkPanther said, Debian based distros are really good. Taking Linux Mint for example, I find that the MATE desktop has slightly better performance than Cinnamon, this is more noticeable on a low end system.

Actually they should all perform more or less in the same range (unless you go with a really outdated version).
You might get a boost by using "bleeding edge" distributions like Arch Linux, Gentoo or Debian Sid, but these ones are a bit harder to use for a newcomer to the Linux world.

I personally use Debian Sid, but most Linux "hardcore" gamers seem to have a preference for Arch Linux (they usually get new versions of softwares, kernel and drivers before Debian Sid, at the cost of a lesser integration).

Here's my latest i3 desktop.

Pretty minimalistic - nothing but a short conky script showing on an i3bar. First one shows Quake running with darkplaces.

Second one is just the empty desktop.

Thanks. Useful info.

Actually, it's a picture of the island of Santorini. I found it via a Chrome extension which showed landscape pictures upon opening a new tab - I ended up not keeping that extension because I thought the selection of that one wasn't varied (I saw just some more pics of Santorini and some from Tuscany, Italy), so it took me a while to recall its name. It's "Dream Afar New Tab" and you can download any pics you see that you like by going to the bottom left corner of the new tab and clicking the icon with a downwards pointing arrow -this will allow you to save the pic to your pc. I'd attach the picture for you normally, but gog doesn't allow for big images to be attached so... Alternatively, if you don't want to download extensions and/or aren't interested in other pics but only this one, this particular pic can be found elsewhere too: Here are the google image search results for this pic (shortened by goo.gl)

If you mean whether you can use a particular icon theme on several window environments without problems, from my own experience I think you can mostly do so without adjustments. I personally installed the Victory icon theme I saw from Ganni on separate Cinammon, MATE and Xfce virtual machines. It showed up fine on all of these without adjustments, although on Xfce it says that the image cache or something like that is missing but I haven't bothered fixing it, because the theme shows just fine despite that.

Now that I added a conky to my desktop there’s finally something to show on it ;)
Don’t look for a taskbar or something like it, I’ve no use for that. My custom-made desktop environment is mostly keyboard-driven.

Nice! What window manager are you using?

My clean desktop.

Openbox with the Crunchy theme (the green variation, to blend well with the Shiki-Colors theme I’m using for GTK2 and Qt4, and my assorted Gnome-Colors icon set).
You’ll find attached to this post a new screenshot with a couple windows open so you can see how it looks. Icons on the desktop are actually minimized windows.

Ambiance Crunchy Openbox theme
Shiki-Colors GTK2 theme
Gnome-Colors icon theme

This is heresy!
Why would you do that?!

You won’t fool anyone, your system is much too reactive to be a real Windows 10 ;)

this is my mac desktop LOL.
I know it's a linux tread, but I don't like any DE of linux... I really don't like KDE (too windows-like), I don't like to use Gnome (I like only the apparence), I don't like simple DE like Mate or cinnamon.... Unity it's ok, so I use that on linux... but I still prefer Aqua from osx.
http://i.imgur.com/gV0px2u.jpg

Have you tried Deepin?

No, this is actually really nice.
The only thing I'm not so sure, it is the compatibility.
On Linux I tried many distro, but the most compatible so far was ubuntu.
Anyway deepin has a site really well done, one of the few in the field of Linux distro... I'm going to try it.