Changing Desktop Environments?

[grump_fiddle_reinstall]

I know some people use Xfce, but don't know if they actually use any phone features.

Yep, I'm using Gnome Calls successfully with XFCE though I had to compile it myself along with all the dependencies. I run eg25manager manually at the moment when I want to make a call and I don't even have audio routing set up. I just run a script to unmute all the ALSA channels for the call.

I get SMS with Pidgin.

So it can certainly be made to work, but it won't have the easy to use polish of something like Phosh.

I got xfce installed today and for the first time managed to boot to desktop. There are some issues that I will start a new thread for but I was pleasantly suprised how touch friendly the xfce desktop actually is. I changed some of the font sizes whilst in an xfce session which appear to have been carried over to the phosh desktop.

I experience the xfce desktop as faster than either phosh or Plasma. The main menu works fine and I find it a lot easier and quicker than swiping up and down and rolling up and down to find an app as the mobile centric UIs force to you do. I am a long term xfce user (started on an eeepc 701) so I feel more at home with it than any mobile UI.

I made a test call to the phone which Calls picked up and was able to send an SMS, I didn't do anything other than starting the apps from the xfce menu. So I was interested to read that you had to do other things to get calls and SMSs working.

I installed Pidgin a couple of days but it crashes fatally on start up at the moment so I couldn't test how well it worked with SMSs.