Linux

XFCE and well, straightforward usage without endless tweaking and customization. On the other side, I recently(~2 years:)) felt in love with tiling window manager BSPWM and keyboard-driven usage.

Lxqt, with pcmanfm's desktop ability turned off. I use the terminal for my file management anyway

I usually have several terminal tabs and web browser tabs open plus a tmux session. Neovim for coding and writing, feh and mpv for viewing media, mpd, supysonic, and minidlna for streaming and playing music.

I went cold turkey to gnome and I use KDE on my laptop. Both configured to use super + type in what I want to open. I quit windows since I got used to it and they stopped providing it. I like both but gnome is way more finished while kde feels a bit janky at times. I really love the customization ability of KDE and I find once I messed up and had to reinstall once, I got over my urges to needlessly rice. I don't know if it is distro specific but I am pretty upset fedora gnome does not have create new file under right click but you have to use terminal (goes completely against gnome philosophy) or to go edit hidden folders and use terminal to create a template (goes very against gnome philosophy).

KDE Plasma and it's configured to have everything in the same places as Windows as much as possible. I have to use Windows for work and gaming and like it when I don't have to think much about which computer I'm using right now.

SwayWM

I've used several over the years, but right now I'm enjoying Hyprland. UWSM is also working well for session management.

My memory is foggy but ive used xfce for a long while, then switched to i3gaps with void linux. stopped using linux cuz they couldn't locate the developer or something( like we didn't get updates for half a year 0_o)

... I ended up forgetting how to use i3. I dont know what the community uses nowadays but my god i3 was AMAZING. It felt like a caveman that just learned how to make fire- and it was a big fucking fire.

I reaaaaally want to use i3 again but do not want to spend the time relearning everything. Highly recommend it though.

After a lot of jumping around I settled for Plasma, with just the default dark theme plus a few minor tweaks and that's it. It's super easy to use and it runs pretty smoothly now unlike 5+ years ago. I was into the whole tiling wm rabbithole for a while but got bored of it and I mostly just want everything fullscreen so I wasn't even making use of the tiling.

Tried i3 a few years back. Never went back. Fucking love it. Would like to ditch X for Wayland soon though. Need to move to Sway but a bunch of scripts depend on X.. Probably wouldn't be too much of a nightmare to transition, but for some reason I've been putting it off for years.

ive used many de's and wm's over the last 15+ years and ended using gnome the most. most familiar with it now so, its fine for me.

Started with Gnome, then i3, Hyprland and now Sway. Gnome not being designed around customisability made me switch to i3. Hyprland has had some stability issues and regressions that annoyed me and so I switched to Sway. Thinking of trying out river at some point.

KDE is the easiest for coming from Windows, you almost never never need the command line or anything "extra" to customize it (beyond what even Windows will allow).

GNOME (especially in Ubuntu) by default is more Macintosh-like which might appeal to some people, it's "simpler" but any customizations will require navigating the add-ons (and in my experience inevitably the command line too).

I think KDE is the one for most people who just want a functioning PC. GNOME could be good for the PC you might make for your parent. Bonus points for an immutable distro which are even harder to break.

KDE has given me the desktop I need for the past few years. Hyprland isn't a desktop environment, as far as I know.

Before KDE I used Cinnamon on Linux Mint. It was functional, but after many years I wanted a change.

Use whatever suits your needs. In my experience, KDE and Cinnamon are the most complete desktop environments without having to install extensions or extra software. Both are mature, have large communities behind them, and release incremental updates frequently. Those are my criteria for a good desktop environment.

Here's mine, simple and functional

I've jumped over the years, Gnome, Cinnamon, KDE, XFCE, Unity, AwesomeWM, QTile, XMonad, Hyprland.

For the last couple of years I've completely settled on KDE for my Desktop, and Gnome on my Laptops.

I love the customisability of KDE and being able to turn it into whatever the hell I want lol. But Gnomes gestures on a laptop are unmatched in the Linux space imo, and finally at a point that I firmly believe Gnome gestures are now on par with MacOS gestures.

I started using Windows as a young lad, but when I tried using Linux I easily transitioned to KDE. Then I tried Gnome and loved it, used it for a few years before moving over to Hyprland a couple of months ago and I can confidently say that I won't be going back.

EDIT:
Forgot to mention that the main reason I love Hyprland is because of the crazy level of customization. I use it primarily on my laptop and can navigate easily with keyboard shortcuts, clicking, and even trackpad gestures.

Don't let somebody else's idea of how to use a DE limit you, just configure whatever you want!

I really like the gnome workflow plus a couple of extensions. Notably I ran across a tiling extension called “grid” that scratched my tiling window needs on my desktop, and gnome is amazing on my laptop trackpad. I zing through desktops quick! Anything it can’t do out of the box, you can find an extension for.

I like the feel of something different than windows.

I use Cosmic and really like it- have used i3, Awesome and Gnome in the past for a while too, I really likes them.

The most time I spent with a set up was Awesome + rofi, which I really enjoyed. I customised literally everything and spent hours tweaking stuff.

That was super fun, but in all honesty my workflow is more or less:

1. Open up a terminal (alacritty, tmux + fish shell + helix editor)
2. Open up a browser (Firefox, have played with others but there's always some quirk where I give up)
3. That's it.

Honestly, all the tweaking is fun for me, but with my workflow I have like 0 requirements for anything fancy. Daily driving cosmic is going nicely for now, and seems to mostly get out of my way.

Never used hyprland but Sway you can use the mouse to move stuff around, resize windows, etc. just hold down you mod key, usually super/windows key. If you have a bar setup correctly you can even click between workspaces or have a task list like on windows that you can click on. Alt Tab needs some re-imagining as its now three dimensional, but that's easy to tweak to how you want it with something like swayr. You can even add a start button equivalent if you wish.

I use Sway on Tumbleweed, before that Sway on Ubuntu. I have six main workspaces defined, odd numbered workspaces on my left monitor and evens on my right monitor. Both monitors are 32"@4k so a ton of real estate, I can easy fit in four large tiles per monitor, eight is a stretch but if you use the option to make windows full screen then you can run stuff in the background and then flip between things that are running in the background.

I use the layman add on to predefined layouts for my different workspaces, then bind apps on start up using my config to a particular workspace. I can still move them around, but automating as much as possible with a tiling windows manager is the secret IMO. Having everything just work and appear where I want with zero faffing around speeds up my workflow enormously. On Windows I use power-toys to provide a noddy version of tiling, but everything has to be done manually and its a complete PITA over a work day where I am opening and closing stuff.

As an example, I have my third workspace as my main coding workspace. Its divided into 3/4 and 1/4. The larger part I lock VS Code to it, the smaller part is usually a Firefox tab for reviewing documentation. My second workspace is my social workspace, that's divided into four long quarters, one for music, one for discord, one for signal, one for mail. All of this, including binding the apps to the workspace, are fully automatic.

I use the keyboard for most things. I use QMK based keyboards (configured using Vial), so I can bind multi modifier shortcuts to just two keys either on a separate layer (activating the layer is one of the two keys) or a chord. Reducing the number of keys you press really helps the ergonomics of activating them, especially if you move them to the home row and away from the pinky finger hell hole that is where the modifiers are on most standard keyboards.

I think the biggest problem is that it requires work to get the right add ons and make it work the way you want to work, but get it right and the WM becomes transparent to how you work.

My preference is the opposite of yours. I just recently set up Hyprland and I love it for the focus on keyboard and the ease of customizing the keybinds.

The other thing I love is the tiling. I almost always have two windows side by side and in every other DE I've used (haven't used cosmic), I always had to faff about to get my windows half and half or into the quarters. So pair that with the keyboard focus and hyprland is the winner for me.

GNOME on my laptop, using the trackpad. Three-finger swipe up to switch tasks/search. Two-finger tap for context menus. Three-finger tap for things like opening in a new tab, or closing a tab. Simple, intuitive, efficient, comfortable.

I love plasma. I used to be into cinnamon, but since the steamdeck, I’ve changed my preference.

Now, I have fedoranplasma spin on my thinkpad.

I really like the windows style DE.

I use Xfce with a swap of the window manager by Bspwm. I got the easy to configure Xfce status bar (instead of things like polybar and others...) and also the Xfce terminal, file manager... The window title is written to the status bar. I use Super + B/N to switch the workspaces. Some apps are set to floating mode like the image viewer, the calculator... So everything can be displayed in a good tiling WM and I don't need to manipulate windows.

After many years of tiling wms I recently settled on Plasma. I found that tiling causes more issues than it solves (window rules much?!). For me tiling only is useful for terminals but there are other solutions for that (tmux for example).

I had to get used to not being able to do workspace per monitor anymore but now I am using Activities which works really well actually. I am a dev and have a 3 monitor setup, one for logging (bunch of terminals), one for coding and one for the output of the project I am working on (browser).

I also play games for which Plasma is perfect, its xwayland implementation is flawless, even on HiDPI which cannot be said of Hyprland for example.

Tl;dr I like Plasma.

Bluefin and GNOME.

I do want to use KDE plasma but everytime I use KDE my ADHD starts kicking in and I make the most cursed UI ever then my notification panel stops working

All I to is use Firefox and at night use krita

I am not using DE i am using hyprland With arch Linux btw

Debian and xfce, generally. I'm happy to wait for features when they arrive, and xfce works fine.

However, Debian with gnome on my surface pro 6. Xorg just doesn't handle rotation and touchscreen things very well.

On the other hand, several apps still behave very poorly under Wayland, so it's a bit of a catch 22 at the moment.

Actually I like Cinnamom the best. For VMs without video accelertion, XFCE. For media center and my laptop I stayed with Ubuntu/Gnome.

Work flow. Any desktop will do, that is more about Apps. For me Firefox, LibreOffice esp Calc, Python, Bash, Thunderbird, ssh, Zim, Geany are what I use most.

KDE.

Mostly like Windows 7, but I recently moved the dock to the top.

Desktop environment? What desktop environment?

Cinnamon, Feels like Gnome done right,it's stable,customizable,Mehh resource intensive. Sadly no HDR AND VRR and a bit messy underneath the hood but I can use gamescope for HDR and VRR and i kinda wish the extension ecosystem was great. My workflow idk but I rarely use gtile actions like Send to kde connect and file converting is useful.

Xfce for speed, consistency, and reliability. For most of my workflow I began avoiding configuring a DE as much as possible by relying on AutoKey, Input Remapper, and simple terminal commands, because I can import those to fresh installs way easier.

I moved away from Plasma due to too many small yet annoying bugs.

PS all the software I use: https://www.arscyni.cc/file/software.html