On my main laptop I use KDE, it's smooth and gets the job done. On my tablet, I use GNOME. It runs well, and is touch-optimized. On my other laptop, I use gnome for no particular reason.

I use KDE plasma 5 atm and i planning on an upgrade to 6 soon; but it's my daily driver so I've dragging my feet on it for a couple weeks now.

What happened when tried troubleshooting those problems you had?

I use herbstluftwm. The configuration is straightforward and it fits my minimal needs.

Xfce4.

y tho

It's inexpensive on resources while leaving me nothing to really... need extra, I suppose. It's old so there's thousands of themes and ways to set it up, and it just feels like home. The speed of the animations and defaults to everything has a very stock Windows XP feel to the desktop despite it looking like nearly anything. The system doesn't get in the way of programs from other desktops or setups in mind and always steps aside.

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.

I'm an XFCE account. I find XFCE to be nice and fast. It's decently light - not the absolute lightest, but most of its installation size is from dependencies you were going to install anyway like GTK.

For now, it's still on xorg, but I think they're working on it.

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!<

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

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.

Sway, will try the new cosmic once its in beta

Qtile, just because it's Python-based.

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.

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.

KDE, it does what I want it to do.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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