KDE : it’s the only DE where I can have 2 identical panels (app pined+ full system tray) on each of my 2 screens without installing extensions.

KDE can do what I want without having to look for extensions. Breeze theme is good enough for me, I don’t need to look for something else. So far it’s the best out of the box experience I had.

I prefer Gnome look, but I distr’hop too often to have the courage to setup the desktop every time.

KDE Plasma because I can bend it to my workflow. When I try Xfce and especially Gnome, I feel I have to bend to their workflows.

Vanilla GNOME because simplicity, very modern look and stability. Cinnamon is nice too but it’s just not for me. Its workflow is slower in my use cases

I use KDE, because it runs perfectly on wayland and covers 100% of my needs.
Budgie looks very promising now and I want to explore it further. Also LXQT is perfect for older devices or if you want a KDE, but simplier.

Fluxbox.

As minimal or extreme as one desires.

Along with Slackware, it’s my type of K.I.S.S.

I’ve been on BSPWM for nearly 2 years now. Custom scripts and keybindings all over the place. My workflow is so customized and keyboard centric with this TWM. Vim bindings in the terminal, Vimium in the browser, and a heavily customized Neovim Text Editor with Espanso Text expander global keybindings very where… Not too mention a 55 key split Ortholinear Keyboard with custom firmware…yeah… My hands almost never touch my mouse except to game.

Not a DE but a WM, but i3.

In the future, probably Cosmic, because I like Gnome’s aesthetic and I prefer something lighter, and because I like i3’s worklow.

Gnome for its looks, simplicity and intuitive ways, but after Plasma 6 release, KDE seems to be up par with Gnome’s UI/UX so at the moment Plasma ia my favourite desktop.

As for WMs I tried i3, Sway, and Hyprland. Overall Hyprland is my favorite because of its special workspace mechanics, customization and options. But if looks had no value to you and you like its scratchpad mechanic then sway is for you (plus its documentation is mostly clearer, better organized and well written than Hyprland). Btw I am not comparing their tiling because there are use cases for each person and you can acomplish each others tiling mode with plugins.

I like best Gnome with modifications, not vanilla. A permanent dock as per “Dash2Dock Animated”, and the “Hide Top Bar” extension, so when an app gets maximized, both the top bar and the dock get out of the way. Also, disabling tap-and-drag via dconf (I really don’t understand why this is enabled by default on most Linux DEs, it’s extremely bad for usability), and enabling the min/max/close buttons via Gnome Tweaks. Other tweaks I like is the Bibata Modern Ice mouse cursor, and the Faenza icon theme. The rest are ok by default for the most part. It’s better than MacOS for me.

Second best gotta be Cinnamon, using the Cinnamenu menu extension, not the default menu. Overall, they’ve thought of almost everything building this DE and its settings. For those who want the best “Windows” could ever be, Cinnamon it is.

Third is XFce. It’s overall good, but it has some things that trigger me: no user admin app, no ability to turn off tap-and-drag (it just doesn’t turn off no matter what you try), and on Debian at least, the machine doesn’t go to sleep without asking for password (requires a policy-kit manual change). Its biggest advantage is that it’s lightweight and I use it as lot for old machines.

I find the rest under-par. I don’t like KDE, and I have thought long and hard why I don’t. It’s not how KDE is structured or works. KDE in fact is fine as a DE! Very powerful. It’s the Qt toolkit that bothers me. When an app loads, it kind of loads in chunks. It doesn’t blast everything rendered in the screen to feel smooth and modern, it kind of renders it as it reads it. And this just bothers me in a UI more than anything. Another thing I dislike is the long right-click menu on the desktop (same for Cinnamon btw).

MATE is nice but it’s just buggy. You setup your panels one way, you logout, you login back again, and the items have changed position. Fully reproducible for me under many different distros. Very, very annoying.

LXDE/LXQT, Budgie, etc, are not as developed as I liked them to be.

Hyperland. Nice, simple, and looks good.

I use kde6+Wayland. I do like the simplicity of Cinnamon, but it runs games slower than kde, even though mangohud claims they run at the same speed. For example, in Cinnamon it’ll say 60fps when it’s clearly in the 30s-40s, and kde actually runs the same thing at 60fps. This is with every tweak i could find, and yes, including turning on the setting to turn off compositing during games.

Kde6 is still quite buggy at times, but I’m really enjoying Wayland’s smoother general behavior over x11, even with x11 stuff like wine/proton. This is on arch + AMD rx 6600 xt. I used old gnome 2, then mate, then Cinnamon for years, but if KDE can clean itself up a little bit (no judgment tho, i get it) it may be my permanent DE. Generally when i go to report a bug, it’s already reported by someone else…

XFCE I find a little tricky to get tiling working right

Just replace xfwm4 with i3wm for example. That and the fact you can use most Xfce tools outside of Xfce is why it’s my favourite.

I currently use Sway primarily. On my work machine, I have to use Zoom, so I use i3 on X1q which acts/feels virtually identical to Sway. (Or rather, the other way around. Sway was made to be a Wayland compositor drop-in replacement for i3 which has been around for a long time.)

I like KDE. But when I need x11 or something lighter weight, I use budgie.

I would say aesthetically always preferred gnome but my laptop which is pretty low end ran slow on it. Kde is in that ballpark for my laptop in terms slowdowns but for the most part it floated through. That was when I used like manjaro.

But I moved on to antix for stability. It has icewm that they configured for the distro. I loved it.

Due to some hardware issue I tested out other distros to see if it was hardware issue or not. Currently my laptop has gnome on it I think.