Gnome on the laptop, its keyboard and touch gestures are the best for notebooks. I also like its simple design and reliability.

KDE on desktop, I'd use gnome, but kwin has more gaming relevant features.

Long time i3 user, recently switched to Hyprland+Wayland. I just don't like mice, don't enjoy using them, and I find the snappiness and responsiveness of keyboard-centric workflows very fun and enjoyable.

I am a software developer, and I am very impatient when it comes to my tools: I like my feedback cycles and interactions to be as tight as possible. This limited study from 2015 showed that developers, on average, spend ~26% of their productive time on stuff that is not related to either code editing or comprehension, including 14% spent on UI interactions. Tiling window manager allows me to streamline most of these interactions through hotkey bindings and shell automation, >!so I prefer spending literal months polishing my dotfiles instead!<

Sway, will try the new cosmic once its in beta

Qtile, just because it's Python-based.

Cinammon cuz I didn't knew it doesn't like kde plasma and now I am too lazy to change it fora bit of time.

I have two, KDE on my laptop that runs Arch (btw) which is my tinkering machine, and GNOME/Pop!_OS on the desktop, which is the one other people use and I'm not allowed to break lol.

Although I might switch the desktop to COSMIC at some point if it doesn't cause too much trouble.

XFCE. Because I'm an idiot, and all my computers are old.

I'm currently using Cinnamon because I thought it would be better than Xfce. While I do think that Cinnamon looks better, there were some minor things that I preferred with Xfce. I want to try other Mate and maybe some of the other DEs if I can find a good distro that has them but I may go back to Xfce the next time I install Linux Mint.

I stopped usin em myself cus my laptop aint nun too fancy and i hated watching my system use 1.5+ while not doing jack, so i tried window managers a couple times until it stuck :3 i3 btw

KDE for its Wayland performance and features and occasionally I switch to hyprland if I need a more focused work environment.
In the past I used Cinnamon but it became ever more buggier on Arch and due to lack of Wayland support still it was a dead end anyway.

KDE. Because of its simplicity. Unsarcastically.

KDE, it does what I want it to do.

KDE, because despite my bitterness for the loss of Unity 8, I know it's merely nostalgia for me. I want something I feel like I can make my own without too much difficulty.

Currently I am on KDE, but I am an xfce lover. I can't wait for the next xfce update and for Cosmic.

I am living KDE almost default. I have the impression that with too much customisation problems come.

Xfce is rock solid and rock solid after customisation too. It is truly amazing.

Gnome needs far too many extension for me to be usable. And so I avoid it.

Cinnamon is great too, but it's in the middle. If I don't want to use Wayland, at that point there is xfce.

XFCE + Compiz

The unholy combination of accelerated 3D graphics and performance, all without the stupid drawbacks of wayland.

Runs much lighter than KDE even with all the 3D cube and windows stuff enabled.

Extremely customizable as well. XFCE already does a great job of UI/UX, it just lacks a compositor to add flare (xfwm4 has no animations, only some blur effects).

Used Mint with Cinnamon for a long time, but always wanted to try KDE after distrohopping a bit. Had it on when I switched to Arch, but didn't like how slow it felt on my old laptop so I tried LXQt and then XFCE. I wanted a modern lightweight environment with Wayland support, but I'll have to wait for it to be implemented. In the meantime, I riced my XFCE just how I like it, and I really like how complete and responsive it is.

Cosmic, just trying it out because i liked the extensions system76 made for gnome, and cosmic DE is more native experience of that.

KDE. It's customizable without adding lots of weirdness. It's got a solid set of included tools like Dolphin and Konsole. It's generally very stable and visually attractive.

No shade to other DEs. I've tried lots of them, I even have a couple of alternative DEs I'll log into when they are useful (i3 is great if I am doing something repetitive). But KDE is just the most comfortable for me for daily use.

The non-Gnome COSMIC DE that System76 has been developing is looking really promising though. I have the alpha on a spare laptop and find it very functional.

Xmonad. I prefer tiling window managers, & I tried Sway but I can’t do color work without proper color management… something Wayland doesn’t support. Thus, I moved back to my old Xmonad config awaiting Wayland to get its shit together after years saying color management was around the corner & distros still adopting it despite not being ready.

I have gnome installed and setup as a backup, plus I use its greeter, but I am another who does not really want a full DE and instead using Sway as my WM day to day.

I have two 32"@4k monitors so normal manual floating window management just annoys me, I greatly prefer tiling window management to auto sort my windows for me. Its extremely rare that I need to full screen anything on monitors this large to fit everything I want in width wise so I want multiple apps per monitor.

If all of this is managed dynamically for me, and I am not manually sizing or overlapping stuff, all the better. Couple that with easy use of multiple workspaces for different tasks (I typically use three per monitor), rarely do I have a need to manually resize anything. I have it setup to open my common apps on the right workspace for me, and each workspace set to the right layout for that set of apps, so much less faffing.

My (40%) keyboard(s) run QMK and are setup to enable most of my common combos, such as switching workspace, moving apps around are never more than two keys. The more I can do without moving my hands from the keyboard, the better for me.

Final thing is that Sway is wayland and for me extremely stable.

Gnome. I actually started with KDE. It's a good DE, but it's got so many options that I had choice fatigue. I constantly tweaked my taskbar instead of focusing on what I wanted to do. And it was easy to get it to a "looks broken" state

When I tried Gnome, I fell in love with it. I love the unique workflow, lack of distractions, the modern adwaita design, etc. Everything felt so polished

That being said, I don't like how Gnome devs seemingly can't agree on anything with other desktop environments. And I don't like how they refuse to support server-side window decorations. Like, I agree with them that CSD are better than SSD, but it would be reasonable to support SSD for toolkits that haven't/don't want to implement CSD themselves, right?

I'm excited for Cosmic. It looks like it combines the best of Gnome and KDE, and the devs don't have the “my way or the highway” mindset

Gnome with dash to dock and the app indicator extensions.

I use DWM in place of a window manager because I love the lightweight, minimalist base, and i like to customise my setup very finely. (I use Arch btw)