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

My desktop environment of choice would be XFCE. It's simply easy to configure while not giving me choice fatigue like KDE does. Also I don't like Qt for some reason.

GNOME is great but I find their extensions to be super clunky sometimes. Some of them even break in between updates. The main selling point of gnome (for me) is the minimal look and feel, extensions kind of ruin that a little bit.

Don't get me wrong plasma and Gnome are wonderful DEs but XFCE provides a simple and balanced desktop IMO. The only thing that's missing is full Wayland support.

P.S : Anyways most of the time I would be running a window manager instead of a DE, my current favourite Wayland window-manager is Labwc because it gives me openbox vibes.

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)

Gnome with dash to dock and the app indicator extensions.

KDE all the way, it's incredible especially since 6

I love KDE. It's got easy to use power user features and is very robust.

Kde because i want customization and standard is also ok. I tried gnome but did not like that extensions were required for tray icons etc. Gnome is otherwise good.

I3 and hyperland i dont get. Some windows should not be very large no matter how much free screen space you have. Example is calculator or old school chat applications like pidgin. No native standard set of applications. Everything must manually be added and custom, like everything in kde settings(sound output, network settings, screen size etc). Waiting for when applications can recommend its screen size to the window manager.

KDE Plasma. It came on my steam deck which was my first intro to it, it blew me away and installed it on my laptop and finally ditched Windows shortly after. Works great for me.

Gnome and Cosmic. Gnome 'cause of simplicity and Cosmic because of Rust.

!I am a Rust programmer and I love this language!<

GNOME, because I started with Red Hat 6 and I'm used to it, on Fedora Silverblue, because I have a long history of fucking up my PC and that makes it harder. For remote machines XFCE because the mouse is cute.

i3. Superb for keyboard-driven environment. Ultra fast, so responsive and configurable. The best.

trinity because it's lighter than almost everything else while having more features than almost everything else

KDE at home "gaming" desktop, but would love to move away from it, for various bugs and non-working configurations. At work and home laptop I am using WMs, riverwm / i3.

Windows 10

Because I am soft and weak from getting smashed every day at my 3 part time jobs and I just want to drink and play video games at the end of the day, not learn a new OS.

I promise to try Linux Mint when windows 10 is no longer supported.

I love gnome and use that for everything except gaming. If I want to game I use KDE

XFCE. I also like tiling WMs, but I often have to share computers and they are too unintuitive for the rest of the family.

I dont use a DE, I use a WM.

Semantics aside I’m on Hyprland, been using it for 6 months now and absolutely love it

XFCE4. It's intuitive and predictable without sacrificing the ability to customize it exactly the way I want (with Chicago95 ofc). The built-in panel widgets are nothing short of amazing: battery, CPU, RAM, network, and disk monitors with labels toggled off to save space and a clock with only what I need on one line: MM/DD HH:mm:ss

Enough features so that it "just works" (no nitpicking through config files), especially on laptops, without being bloated in any way. Bonus of its lightweight nature is that I can keep my Debian/XFCE setup consistent across all of my machines, both old and new.

Can't wait for the finished xfwm4 port to wayland so I don't have to sacrifice some security running X11 and so I can do fractional scaling on hidpi machines.

KDE on my main gaming PC, or if I want something that looks really modern and sleek without tons of setup/tweaking on another PC.

Mint with Cinnamon if I want a #justworks setup that is rock stable and I don't need to look sexy.

My side business laptop uses LMDE with Cinnamon for that reason. I need that thing to be rock stable and dependable at all times.

Cinnamon has been more stable for me than any other DE, and in my experience, is just as performant as other low-spec favorites like XFCE. My fresh install of LMDE with Cinnamon right after boot uses about 850MB of memory. My testing with XFCE was about the same, maybe 50-75MB less, which for my use case is effectively identical.

Not crapping on XFCE though, I like playing with it on one of my old thinkpads. Not a fan at all of Gnome, I've tried to like it for years, but I just don't care for it, and I experience quite a few bugs.

I plan on trying the new Cosmic DE soon, it seems like Gnome done better, and I could see myself liking it from the reviews I've watched.

kde plasma, it's fast, it's pretty, it's handy, it has all the keyboard shortcuts.