Other Desktops

Beyond KDE, Hyprland, and Niri, the Genesi installer offers several more traditional desktops. All of them install through the Calamares desktop step or later with pacman, and you switch between them from the SDDM session menu.

These are upstream desktops packaged as-is — the deep Genesi glass theming is a KDE thing. They work perfectly on Genesi; they just look like themselves.

GNOME

A clean, opinionated, workflow-driven desktop built around the Activities overview and keyboard search. Great on laptops and touchscreens.

sudo pacman -S gnome

Xfce

Lightweight, fast, and rock-solid traditional desktop. A great pick for older hardware or anyone who wants a classic taskbar-and-menu layout that stays out of the way.

sudo pacman -S xfce4 xfce4-goodies

Cinnamon

A modern take on the traditional desktop — familiar menu, panel, and window buttons, with polished animations. Comfortable if you're coming from Windows.

sudo pacman -S cinnamon

Budgie

An elegant, modern desktop that keeps things simple and familiar, with the Raven side panel for notifications and settings.

sudo pacman -S budgie-desktop

COSMIC

System76's next-generation desktop, written in Rust. Fast and tiling-friendly with a fresh design.

sudo pacman -S cosmic

COSMIC is still under heavy development. Expect rough edges and frequent updates compared to the mature desktops above.

LXDE

An extremely lightweight desktop for very low-resource machines, where even Xfce feels heavy.

sudo pacman -S lxde

Each of these has its own upstream documentation and Arch Wiki page (e.g. GNOME, Xfce) with configuration details that apply directly to Genesi.