KDE on my main laptop, Cinnamon on the TV-connected mini-PC in my living room. I like the customization options of KDE, and with Cinnamon I just wanted to test out Linux Mint, no big reason other than that. I used GNOME for some time with Pop_OS!, and it was not fully my thing. I plan to test out more DEs when I can free up an older laptop to do some more experimentation - for my main laptop I require stability, so I don't mess around with it too much.

Usually KDE, but I'm messing around with qtile atm.

OpenBox but that's a window manager, not a DE.

XFCE.

I recently switched to it after a year or so with KDE. Deff see some improvement in terms of battery life with my laptop, but I'm still not used to the lack of WinKey+Num shortcuts (I'm aware of docklike, but I need labels for open windows).

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.

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

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.

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)

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, 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.

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!<

KDE Plasma 5.

It's default on Slackware =P

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.

COSMIC. I was using Hyprland before but I wanted to try the alpha. I found it stable enough for my use-case so I stuck with it

I'm running MATE on my laptop. It gives me what I need (a task bar, space for some instrumentation, the usual desktop functionality, a way to start applications) and nothing that I don't care about (wobbling windows, compiz, stuff like that). My DE is a tool; I use tools that don't get in my way because I have work to do.

I might give COSMIC a try in a few months, I haven't decided yet.

Plasma, but I'll be moving to cosmic as soon as it enables auto power off of monitors on idle

For my main workstation and main laptop:

• Cosmic themed GNOME - I just like the way it looks and works without any changes. The basic tiling functions are something I find helpful at times too.
• Plasma 6 - It works pretty well and looks nice. I don't do a lot of customization, so it's not a big deal to me. For my other machines I'm currently using Cinnamon, GNOME, Budgie, and LXDE.

I recently made a new linux install (to replace my constantly breaking, likely due to my own doing Manjaro install). I went with Cinnamon initially, but in order to try out Wayland, I moved to KDE plasma.

I'm on NVidia, with two different resolution screens. Which causes occasional problems. But overall it's fine.

Xmonad with XFCE in no-desktop mode.

I can use the xfce tools to configure things like mouse and screen settings, but visually it's just xmonad.

Qtile, just because it's Python-based.

Xfce. Partly because I've used it for a long time, but mostly because it does what I need it to do and little else.

COSMIC most of the time and then gnome as a fallback when I run into any temporary issues I can't work around.

I do this with a custom bluebuild image I made that uses ublue (fedora 41) as a base and then added cosmic on top along with some other layers that I need/want.