




If you’re running a GNOME-based system and would like to avoid installing parts of KDE, you can instead choose Guake, which is a drop-down terminal developed for GNOME. The only thing you might not like about it is the fact that it’s based on KDE Konsole. Yakuake is one of the most popular drop-down terminals because it’s smooth, configurable, skinnable, and has a tabbed interface. Sounds familiar? That’s probably because the design of the drop-down terminal was inspired by consoles in computer games like Quake and Half-Life. What’s a drop-down terminal? Essentially, it’s just a regular terminal that slides down from the top of the screen when a certain key combination is pressed. You may not know it yet, but you need a drop-down terminal in your life. Apart from Linux, Alacritty also runs on Windows, macOS, and *BSD. You should be able to find Alacritty in your distribution’s repositories, but you can also download Precompiled binaries from Alacritty’s GitHub releases page. But if you want to, you can simply open its well-documented configuration file in your favorite text editor and tweak Alacritty to your liking. In addition to its performance, Alacritty also offers simplicity and sane defaults, which greatly reduce the need for post-installation tweaking. Written in Rust, this GPU-accelerated terminal uses OpenGL for rendering to achieve fantastic performance even when running in fullscreen mode on a 4K monitor. AlacrittyĪlacritty has been the most trending Linux terminal since its launch in 2017. Instead, we’re focusing on the best available alternatives so you have a lot of options to choose from regardless of whether you place greater value on minimalism or features. This article isn’t about Linux terminals that ship with popular desktop environments, such as GNOME Terminal, Konsole, or xfce4-terminal. It doesn’t matter if you’re a casual Linux user or a season system administrator, a good terminal emulator can vastly improve your experience, allowing you to unleash the full potential of Linux and various command-line tools.
