Linux

My favourite that I use lots of places is Gnome. Love using it. Use it completely stock.

I also use KDE, which is fine, but I don’t much care for it, I always find it to be buggy and unreliable. Could well be pebkac errors, but I’ve seen it across multiple machines over the years. With this said I still use kde on one machine.

I also use sway. Which is a wayland window manager. I find it very good. I’ve heard that hyprland is also good, but I’m not looking to mess with a window manager, I just like it to be simple, so I’ve not really tried it.

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.

KDE Plasma. I like having a familiar start menu and keyboard shortcuts

Sway on a chromebook with 4gb ram, sway on thinkpad t430, xfce on my gf's laptop, and gnome on my gaming rig that will go soon either cosmic or just sway. For me sway is thewinner. Sway with me... Marimba... Lalala

Edit: also gnome on the kichen pc with touch. Gnome is the only one that works fully on touch.

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.

Gnome on one machine, LXDE on another.

I use Gnome on my main laptop, a Thinkpad P50. I bought it with a dock thinking I'd use it at my desk and on the sofa but it's a bit of a beast so that stays on my desk and I use an L440 with LXDE on the sofa. Considering trying LCARS on the sofa machine.

I use Gnome, but I just wanted to say Cinnamon is fantastic (probably my first choice if I weren't on a laptop)

I used enlightenment for something like a decade. When Gnome hit the big time I used Gnome because it looked Nice and was very flexible. I went back to Mac and Windows Land for a bit, when I came back I went Gnome again. I just screw around for a day looking and picking plugins and fighting with it to get it exactly how I wanted it. After fighting with one of the older plugins that mustn't doing what I wanted to do I saw somebody mentioned using KDE. I tried KDE and sure enough every single thing I was plugging the hell out of Gnome for was a default setting in KDE. I'm currently running Plasma. I must say that Cinnamon's not bad either.

I used Enlightment for the last few years, but switched this year to XFCE because i like the look more. I'm using old-as-fuck-hardware and both DEs work good on my machines.

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!<

Gnome.

With NoMachine to my Windows Host, hot keys go to the host as intended.

Rustdesk can't do it in any config and they don't care at this stage.

KDE Plasma

It was what came on the steam deck lol

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

KDE Plasma.

GNOME kind of looks nice but is too strict on customization.

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

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

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.

I use hyprland with KDE as my fall back.

My hyprland config is 95% stable but some apps give me a hard time, so I'll just run them in KDE.

I find KDE just works. With a baby, things need to work more often than not.

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).

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)

KDE Plasma on my PC, just use i3 on my laptop. prefer using the mouse on a pc, prefer not using it on a laptop.

None. Openbox WM with Tint2 as a rudimentary system bar, Rofi as launcher.

Typically I don’t use a DE. I’ll go for dmenu + dwm usually if I only want a WM. I find the default bindings and behaviour for the tiling is the most ergonomic when comparing it to other WMs like i3.

When I do have to get a DE setup then I’ll use XFCE because I like how it stays out of the way and I find it easy to customise.

Plasma.

When I try Gnome, within a couple minutes I encounter the Save dialog that defaults the cursor to the Search field instead of the Filename field, and the top of my head goes spinning across the room, and I uninstall it.

Enlightenment. It's pretty and really fast. Of course you can't complete with the speed of tile wm. But their development speed is so slow....

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.