Gnome. Feels most polished and least cluttered to me.

Plasma definitely. Xfce is second.

Plasma. It’s the most customizable and you can dive in and shape it. It feels much more natural for me to jump into.

I put xfce on older hardware.

Distro wise I tend to go with Ubuntu flavors most because they seem to have better compatibility for various software and stuff I need, but I haven’t really shopped around too hard in years. Work is RHEL (and clones) and they make me sad.

KDE for me. As much as I hate windows, I like the floating windows, task bar and tray. KDE has that out of the box and lets me tweak all the little annoyances away.

Plasma, but only on Wayland (which is better anyway unbiased opinion).

Gnome 44. Simple, familiar and all my extensions work!

I use Debian with XFCE.Really lightweight and stable

Xfce. It's lightweight and looks great with a little bit of customisation. For me it's the perfect balance between performance, usability and looks

Sway

KDE

It's like a swiss-army knife of DEs.

I try to make it look like Windows 7.

GNOME

Gnome

In my (and my friend's) experience, KDE has been notoriously unreliable. We faced issues like the wifi icon just disappearing randomly, the time thingy disappearing, etc.

I have been using GNOME for around five years now (I temporarily switched to KDE 2 yrs back and reswitched to GNOME 3 months later). Till now, GNOME has been extremely stable for me. The only issue that I experienced was a memory (although that was fixed in subsequent updates).

Hence, based on this experience, if you're looking for stability, I would highly recommend GNOME. However, if u'r looking for more customization at the cost of less stability, KDE ain't bad.

I love cinnamon a lot

Personally I've been on KDE for a few years, I love the way I can customize my workflow, from the default apps to the panels layout. The KDE team has made fantastic progress since I've started using it, and it's now very stable and feature rich. I'm very excited for the upcoming Plasma 6

And as a reminder to everybody, please donate if you can, no matter what software you use. Especially if you've been using that DE for a while. Open source projects like these are always in need of funding!

For me, from most to least favorite, it goes:

Cinnamon

Mate

KDE

xfce

Bash-only; no GUI

doing my math homework by counting on my toes

Losing three fingers in a table saw accident

GNOME

Edit to add: I love the "one newline in the editor is no newlines in the published comment." The internet isn't getting worse by the minute at all.

XFCE. It's just so easy to click and drag things where I want them and edit icons to be uniform.

Have you tried testing out DE in a virtual machine? It's a big time saver versus installing it on actual hardware.

KDE

I love KDE Plasma, been using it for years. Cinnamon is very good too, especially for folks that like the Windows 7 style.

Cosmic is nice from the little I've used it, but I prefer a DE with more options.

Not a Gnome fan personally, I've tried it many times, just can't get into it, but objectively it's solid.

I like Vanilla GNOME the best atm.

GNOME. A lot of people customize it to look and behave more like Windows or Macos, and I used to as well, but after giving the default configuration a chance and getting used to it, I prefer it over everything else. It's way more focused and organized, and I can navigate through my open windows quicker and easier. It's just a different workflow you need to adjust your brain to.

KDE Plasma. Number 2 is Cinnamon

KDE and Cinnamon.

KDE. I tried gnome, xfce etc. but theyre either stripped down (xfce) or designed in a way that bothers me. (gnome)

KDE, I enjoy the whole ecosystem both visually and functionally.

I like Xfce and Plasma, it's pretty hard to decide between the two

I really like plain "boring" vanilla Gnome. It's straightforward, I like it's workflow, it does everything I need it too, and looks nice too. I'm not a fan of "power user" UIs as I feel like they have too many features I'll never use filling them up. You can always get more programs to do more things anyway. Like I use compilers and disassemblers all the time, but I'm not upset that Gnome doesn't ship with those features built in when I'm in some weird 1% of users that need them. On the other hand, I think KDE is important to the ecosystem too, and I donate $100 a year to both the Gnome and KDE projects.

I have to say KDE Plasma, but I look really forward toward Cosmic Rust.

KDE is simply so damn old and has weird quirks everywhere, it has features and basic things like

• functional apps: dolphin, spectacle, kate, kde connect, systemsettings, discover, ...
• SSD with hitboxes in the very corner (looking at you GNOME)
• wayland support
• a regular but modular bottom panel
• extensible everywhere

But it also just has too many features. Extensions are not tested or versioned so many simply dont work anymore, often some of the dozens of components has an issue. I cant imagine Cosmic reaching the level of features in like 3 years, but if it would do, this could be great. But in the end its up to the devs, so I have no idea at all.

I dont find GNOME usable really. At least in the default settings. The decorations make no sense on Desktops (they are perfect for tablets), the top bar makes you look down too much, the ubuntu way wastes space too. Everything is too thick, too little GUI settings and the standard apps could be from Android, the little features they have.

maybe this is a hot take but I just really like vanilla KDE. I don't even customize that much, I just think it looks and feels nice out of the box

Kde Plasma. Customized so there are no visible panels, only an auto-hide panel at the top for wifi/bluetooth etc. I do app switching and opening new apps via the Overview effect.

Hyprland

Cinnamon LMDE

Keep in mind I am insane and you shouldn't take this as a recommendation unless you are also weird in the ways I am, but I absolutely love NsCDE, it's an FVWM based modern clone of the old CDE desktop from old UNIXs and VMS and it is so so well executed and I love it.

Gnome on laptop, gnome with extentions on one pc and kde on another.

Gnome. It looks simple and elegant, is easy and intuitive to use, and everything I need is either built in or available as an extension.

The one caveat is that you probably shouldn't update it right on day one of a new version release, because usually some extension devs need a few more days to update their stuff. My distro (Fedora) always releases new versions a few months after Gnome does, so this works out perfectly.

I use Hyprland, but if not, then GNOME... It's just pretty and easy to use out of the box

I recently switched back to GNOME after a few years on KDE, mostly because of Wayland support. I honestly don't care much about the DE, provided it gets out of my way. I used to use a Tiling WM, so I may give a Wayland tiling WM a shot.

MATE as is or Xfce with some MATE software (swapping Thunar for Caja, swapping the XFCE calculator program for MATE's calculator, using Engrampa instead of whatever Xfce uses for a file archive manager, etc.). I like things simple and following roughly the same paradigm that I've used for years.

And for the love of god, PLEASE KEEP MENU BARS AS THEY WERE IN THE PAST! Stop removing menu bars from programs in favor of "hamburger buttons" or whatever nonsense modern programs like to use! That's honestly one of my biggest gripes with "modern" software, they keep changing the paradigm to something that I haven't used and I can't be bothered to relearn everything.

GNOME. I currently use it without any extensions, but sometimes use “Blur my shell” for the visual effect.

GNOME “just works” and looks extremely polished and consistent. It gives the application the maximum amount of screen real estate. The keyboard shortcuts are great. It’s very power-user friendly IMO.

LXQT followed by Plasma