KDE Plasma. It's the most feature rich "just works" DE there is. GNOME doesn't even have fucking maximize and minimize buttons by default without adding them via GNOME Tweaks.

I used to be a Cinnamon/Linux Mint lover, but their slow implementation of Wayland, Window Scaling, and certain other annoyances like their split NetworkManager GUI between GNOME's UI and the native NetworkManager UI made me switch.

Enlightenment DE

Currently using gnome with lots of extensions. Ive tried many DEs but gnome always feels like home. I also like kde a lot but there something about qt that feels so amateur and unpolished, and I can't get steam to run on kde out of the box, with gnome it just works. Also the times I've used kde I always end up replicating the gnome layout so I just decided to stick with gnome in the long run

KDE Plasma all the way, on the desktop, the laptops and the two set top boxes.

Sway and Gnome

The latter is mostly for other family members. But I like both.

Sway

Cosmic.

Openbox was my favourite, but there's not a really good Wayland alternative yet so I've stuck with KDE for years.

I wanted to try Cosmic so I went to the source with popos and it's really a good time. I haven't used a Deb/Ubuntu base since the Crunchbang days but this is good and it seems there is a Cosmic update pushed through every week.

Cinnamon. It's like a combination of kde and gnome.

I am sorry if my English is bad.

Hyprland, trying to go back to sway.

hyprland

i3

With alacritty, qutebrowser, neovim and LibreWolf. I use my custom dmenu-based utilities for things like launching apps, locking (with slock), controlling (ie. postponing :D) redshift and music player and opening bookmarks, links and searches. Thunar is the most DE-like app I use but being comfortable with Bash i use Thunar just for certain tasks like organizing files like photos. (For quick text edits, I sometimes prefer Mousepad. For screenshots it's slock+maim.)

I don't "rice", I just set some color schemes years ago and use simple wallpaper (which I rarely see.) And keep everything as minimal and out of way as possible.

(I don't care about Wayland unless I'm somehow forced to. I mean, some of my utils depend on X11 for things like clipboard access but I suppose it could be fixed easily nowadays. However X11 works fine for me so if it ain't broken...)

Cinnamon

KDE Plasma because I'm basic and I wanna get stuff done 👍

I have KDE Plasma, Hyprland, and Mango (WM) installed.

Of the three, I use Mango most of the time, and KDE Plasma sometimes. Hyprland, I've kept because most of my config was for it, and I'm still currently porting them to Mango. Most of the dotfiles are in their own areas, though I've mostly piggybacked on Plasma components. One area that I've got some trouble with is program theming. KDE Plasma has its own, Qt has its own (which is different from the KDE Plasma one), and GTK is yet another. I've decided that the best way to deal with it is to make them look as similar as I can, so that whether I'm on Mango, Hyprland, or KDE Plasma, my programs will look the same--except for the presence of window titlebars, which Mango doesn't show, Hyprland shows via a plugin, but KDE Plasma does show.

I used Ubuntu's implementation of Gnome back when I started dabbling with Linux some time ago. I didn't bother theming it. And then I moved to XFCE when that underpowered machine I was using couldn't handle Ubuntu's Gnome without feeling like it's swimming in molasses. XFCE is nice and configurable in contrast, and I didn't have much to complain about. However, I found its configuration back then to be quite troublesome, especially as I tried tweaking my own bars and panels.

I then moved to KDE Plasma when I got my current machine. It was pretty okay out of the box, but coming from a tweaked XFCE, I couldn't stop myself from theming it to my liking. Hyprland was introduced to me mid-2024, and I was thrust head-first into configuring it from scratch, no dotfiles to copy from, or pre-made shells to make my experience easier.

At present, Mango won me over by having a decent vertical scrolling layout, as well as the flexibilty of using other layouts on the fly. While I like Hyprland's level of polish and customizability, and recently have implemented scrolling (both vertical and horizontal), I am staying with Mango if only because I've already done the work porting most of my stuff there.

KDE. I don't even do much to customize it. I think it looks pretty good out of the box.

People tend to dislike this, but I LOVE gnome. It runs a lil heavy, but damn it's clean, smooth, fast, easy & decluttered.

No dot files, no config, and it's intuitive

I use KDE. I like how easy it is to customize pretty much everything. Like, if I want everything to be green, I can make everything green and no one can stop me.

sway. I tried hyprland, but it was unable to switch between different maximized windows (monocle layout). There was a way, but it triggered a resize on every window switch, which was slow and annoying. I don't know if it's perhaps been fixed since then.

KDE Plasma. It's clean, fast, and just works.

Niri + Noctalia shell. I find the scrolling tiles to be excellent for my workflow, and the desktop shell feels nice and polished. Plus, Niri supports the Wayland zwlr_layer_shell, which means I can finally use Wallpaper Engine; there's even a Noctalia plugin for it.

Niri has been great for gaming and streaming, so be sure to check it out if you haven't.

I would be hesitant to use anything but KWin with Plasma. They were designed together as a set (like Mutter and Gnome), and I suspect replacing the WM would be no small task.

KDE Plasma, as it’s most Windows-like and it has lots of cool widgets to add to your desktop Windows 7-style.

I’ve also tried Gnome, but I found it confusing and honestly a bit annoying. Not being able to properly minimise like I’m used to just really throws me off. I do think the visual style is well-designed, though.

I’ve tried Cinnamon as well. I thought it looked a bit too cheap for my taste, at least by default on Mint.

I use mainly StumpWM, a tiling window manager which uses concepts very similar to Emacs. For example, one can define key chords, bind keys to lisp functions, and auto-generate input for a program window.

If it isn't available, I use i3, or occasionally GNOME.

TDE. Solid, familiar, stays out of my way.

Sway, it's fast, pretty, easy to customize, and can do headless displays to stream with Sunshine.

XFCE with Compiz with all the 3D effects enabled lol.

If you want wayland then wayfire is supposed to be the spiritual successor, but it's still technically beta software.

Lightly customized KDE plasma, it truly is just the best de out there. However when I'm feeling a bit playful and not looking to do actual work or using my laptop without a mouse I do switch over to hyprland sometimes.

Xfce, specifically because I like the Chicago95 theme.

KDE, but only with an extension called kröhnkite for auto tiling. To me a manual stacked window management system is almost unusable. As someone who used tiling window managers for years and lots of KDE based applications, and as KDE was one of the first who worked well in Wayland, I thought to give it a shot. I like it and since then (years by now) stayed on KDE.

For reference, I used Gnome 2 on Ubuntu, made the switch to Unity desktop, then Gnome 3 (and I think Gnome 4 too?, don't remember). Then started experimenting with Regolith, auto tiling for Gnome, and tried out real tiling window managers, until I landed on qtile. Then experimented with Xfce, before finally making the switch to KDE (because of Wayland). Rest is history.

I use Cinnamon, it’s not much, but it just works.

Gnome

Cosmic. It's still a little buggy but getting better.

KDE Plasma but mainly I use sway.

I'm on Mango, and it's amazing for me. It's well documented, as well as extremely flexible. I love it.