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 is what finally got me to switch from Windows.

Out of the box I found it a better user experience than Windows 10s desktop, but having it be stupid easy to customize and theme on top of that has made me never wanna go back.

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

KDE

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

I try to make it look like Windows 7.

Sway

Gnome

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.

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!

KDE

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 Plasma. Number 2 is Cinnamon

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

KDE and Cinnamon.

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

GNOME

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

I love cinnamon a lot

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.

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. 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.

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.

Cinnamon LMDE

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.

Hyprland

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

I like Vanilla GNOME the best atm.

I much prefer Cinnamon.

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

LXQT followed by Plasma

I LOVE KDE. Seriously. But there is no proper Sliding TWM for it at the moment and it's soooooo good having a proper one. I tried Karousel but it was too glitchy, especially when streaming. Thus, I am on Gnome with PaperWM. A simply phenomenal experience! :)

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

KDE, I've been using it since the late 90s. I've tried other DEs but nothing comes close IMO.

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.

hyprland currently but maybe switching to awesomewm or qtile. it takes effort to configure/learn them so idk if you are open to try them at the beginning. or if you prefer a conventional environment like gnome, kde, xfce...