KDE.

Back when everyone was failing horribly trying to come up with a new desktop that nobody wanted KDE was the only one to get it right.

Instead of trying to shovel some bullshit "next generation" interface down your throat they decided to make all of the interface parts modular.

If you want traditional start menu you can have it, want Mac style dock got that covered, want a touch/table type interface it's in there. If you can't make up your mind you can setup activities to flip back and forth.

KDE. I used to use Gnome but switched over to KDE a few years ago.

GNOME. Been using Linux since before GNOME Shell was a thing and when it became a thing it just clicked for me. In my opinion, it's by far the most polished DE and provides the most elegant and intuitive launcher and workspace switcher of any DE or OS I've used. At least they did, until they fucked it up by moving from vertical to horizontal workspaces and made the workspace previews so small you can no longer see what's in them.

Which is the downside of GNOME. Sometimes their developers are their own worst enemies. Fortunately, there are usually extensions to fix the most egregious "enhancements".

GNOME. I love the ecosystem of apps and the great design and simplicity, even if I sacrifice customization and features.

GNOME is designers trying to develop a DE

KDE is developers trying to design a DE.

Gnome without extensions. It gets out of the way and let's me work. Whenever I have to use something else, it feels like going backwards in time. I used to love tinkering with my system and tried a lot of DE's back in the days. Don't have the time for that anymore.

I did have to adjust though. I think that a lot of the hate gnome gets is because of this. If you espect it to work like a traditional desktop you're going to get frustrated and install too many extensions to make it like one. My advise would be to set aside your presumptions and try it like it's meant to be used. You might be surprised, I know I was...

A while ago I found this video, which explains it in more detail.

KDE Plasma

KDE

Qtile. Full DEs are for rich people.

Kde

For a while I used tiling window managers, no DE really, but for the past year or so I’ve been using KDE and really enjoying it again.

GNOME 44 with a couple extensions. I'm a big fan of its general look and feel

Sway and I love it. A bit of a hassle to configure but once it's set up how I like it's then it's great! I tried hyprland for a bit and it was super shiny but I just haven't had the time to tweak.

GNOME. It doesn't let customization get in the way of me using it, but everything I actually need to change has an extension to do that, even on my Surface.

MATE:

I like traditional desktops.

GNOME is perfect for me, 100% vanilla, I don't even have Tweaks installed.

Gnome. It's minimalistic and extensible.

KDE, but sometimes I use i3 on my laptop

XFCE. I love how lightweight it is.

GNOME. However, I use ArcMenu and Dash to Panel to get a KDE/Windows style taskbar UX.

Why do I use GNOME then, you might ask? Well, I really like the simplicity and aesthetic of GTK/Adwaita. KDE is too noisy - for example, the built in text editor (Kate) can double as an IDE, when all I'm really looking for is a box I can type in.

I use Gnome with the pop-os tweaks: shell, launcher, and workspaces. Looking forward to the new COSMIC DE from System76.

TDE aka Trinity Desktop Environment, a fork of KDE 3.

KDE, but it doesn't super look like it anymore.

Cinnamon for a few years now.

Gnome. It just seems simple, elegant and smooth. It does what I need from a DE (not that much, I do a lot in terminal and Emacs). It has good keybindings out of the box and good virtual desktop mechanisms. It was also the first DE with good Wayland support. At first I was unsure if I liked Gnome’s concept and restrictions, but I’ve grown to like it fast.

Using Plasma currently.

Qtile but that's just a WM

Cinnamon almost exclusively. But sometimes plasma.

xmonad on my desktop, KDE on my laptop, haven't felt like setting up xmonad on there and KDE last I checked doesn't work correctly on my desktop since I use the Nvidia viewport settings to get my displays to act as 1080p displays.

Gnome + ArcMenu + Dash to Panel = <3

Sway for going on 2 years I think. I do recommend it, and Wayland/tiling wms in general.

I use my own fork that uses bspwm-style "long-side split by default," and a nearly transparent under-the-hood container-squashing refactor that prevents this behavior from causing the tree to become bloated with invisible nodes and start to lag horribly. The fix won't be accepted in Sway since it's the bug is faithfully reproduced from i3, and I haven't had time to rewrite it for i3. But if you use something like sway-autotiling, you've probably noticed the issue.

Cinnamon on Manjaro.

Yes, I know using Manjaro is cheating, but I could not be arsed to set up a DE by hand for the upteenth time. Manjaro Cinnamon ISO go *brrrrrrrr*

Used to be xfce or lxde, but have switched to gone the past 2-3 years.

I3, I love the way it’s workspaces work with multiple monitors.

i3

SwayWM which is basically "i3: Wayland Edition."

I used GNOME but a bunch of angry Linux fanboys told me my worth as a human was nonexistent since I didn’t have XFCE installed so I installed Mac OSX instead. Loving clippy rn.

Hyprland for me.

I use gnome and plasma. Recently more plasma than gnome but I switch between them when there are new versions to explore. :)

Mate desktop with i3 as the window manager. Killer lightweight combo and massive boost to productivity.

XFCE usually. Two years ago it didn't support my weird multi monitor configuration, so I still have one computer with Gnome.

KDE on my laptop, XFCE on my media server