I prefer KDE a lot, because:

• the UI is simple, material-ish and beautiful
• it doesnt sacrifice usability or waste screen space like GNOMEs minimalism. I especially like the buttons etc. of Qt apps, where GIMP is already struggling with the huge hugeness of GTK3.
• it runs 100% on Wayland
• it runs GNOME apps without modifying them a bit. There is an issue where Fedora doesnt want to use Adwaita icons, but a short autostart entry solves that. KDE Breeze dark/light can sync to adwaita dark/light
• KDE has tons of legacy support features, have a look at my experiment where I explored many of them
• it is modular and can be pretty minimal (I would like a more barebones version, without all the floating stuff etc)
• all the settings are in the same app! This is a huge issue with all the small ones, where nontechnical users need to know the difference between "GTK settings" "lightDM settings", etc.
• Systemsettings are searchable, all settings pages are accessible from the global search, some pages are even shown when you use an alternative word, you can always search in english and your local language
• it is very actively developed
• it has tons of unique features.
• it has the biggest most complex apps situated in a DE on Linux. Period. KDEnlive, digiKam, Krita, Kate, Dolphin, ...

I use KDE, because it runs perfectly on wayland and covers 100% of my needs.
Budgie looks very promising now and I want to explore it further. Also LXQT is perfect for older devices or if you want a KDE, but simplier.

emacs

Vanilla GNOME because simplicity, very modern look and stability. Cinnamon is nice too but it's just not for me. Its workflow is slower in my use cases

I like best Gnome with modifications, not vanilla. A permanent dock as per "Dash2Dock Animated", and the "Hide Top Bar" extension, so when an app gets maximized, both the top bar and the dock get out of the way. Also, disabling tap-and-drag via dconf (I really don't understand why this is enabled by default on most Linux DEs, it's extremely bad for usability), and enabling the min/max/close buttons via Gnome Tweaks. Other tweaks I like is the Bibata Modern Ice mouse cursor, and the Faenza icon theme. The rest are ok by default for the most part. It's better than MacOS for me.

Second best gotta be Cinnamon, using the Cinnamenu menu extension, not the default menu. Overall, they've thought of almost everything building this DE and its settings. For those who want the best "Windows" could ever be, Cinnamon it is.

Third is XFce. It's overall good, but it has some things that trigger me: no user admin app, no ability to turn off tap-and-drag (it just doesn't turn off no matter what you try), and on Debian at least, the machine doesn't go to sleep without asking for password (requires a policy-kit manual change). Its biggest advantage is that it's lightweight and I use it as lot for old machines.

I find the rest under-par. I don't like KDE, and I have thought long and hard why I don't. It's not how KDE is structured or works. KDE in fact is fine as a DE! Very powerful. It's the Qt toolkit that bothers me. When an app loads, it kind of loads in chunks. It doesn't blast everything rendered in the screen to feel smooth and modern, it kind of renders it as it reads it. And this just bothers me in a UI more than anything. Another thing I dislike is the long right-click menu on the desktop (same for Cinnamon btw).

MATE is nice but it's just buggy. You setup your panels one way, you logout, you login back again, and the items have changed position. Fully reproducible for me under many different distros. Very, very annoying.

LXDE/LXQT, Budgie, etc, are not as developed as I liked them to be.

KDE. Looks great OOTB. Looks better if you spend an hour or two setting it up on day 1.

Gnome.

• The workflow is amazing once it "clicks" (but in the few days it takes before that happens, man it's annoying. You end up asking yourself time and again why don't they just copy Windows like everybody else)

• With the exception of ElementaryOS, Gnome seems to be the only DE that really cares about design, especially in terms of consistency. Random bits of text in different sizes, different fonts in different places, inconsistent padding, improper handling of rounded corners, etc all really bug me. Most people don't seem to notice or care (probably because MS has trained us not to care about UX consistency lol), but for me it wears me out and makes me hate using PCs. Gnome is a polished UX and it feels like everything was designed very purposely, with a lot of thought.

• There's a good ecosystem of GTK4/Libadwaita apps.

• Probably have the best accessibility features.

• It's really stable for being a modern DE.

• I respect the devs for having a vision and sticking to it, despite getting hate/death threats for it. It's led to a different and very functional DE, unshackled from the traditional Win95 UX paradigm.

E: just because it's not your DE of choice doesn't mean you need to downvote me or send me DMs calling me names lmao. Some people in the Linux community are completely unhinged lol

KDE Plasma because I can bend it to my workflow. When I try Xfce and especially Gnome, I feel I have to bend to their workflows.

KDE Plasma.

Kde plasma for all the reasons you hate it for 😂

I love Gnome even if the fact that I have to add 2-3 extensions to make it work to my taste bothers me a little bit.

It should have a bit more options by default, while still retaining the beautiful UI.

I’m trying KDE in a virtual machine a little bit, but I guess I’ll never really explore its capabilities if I don’t daily drive it.

By the way, could someone explain what’s the difference between a WM and a DE?

GNOME. Won't say I don't hate it sometimes but every time after a few weeks using anything else I'm back to gnome. The polish and smoothness are unparalleled, and I don't really customize a lot. I did used the Plasma 6 beta and seemed great even if it's not my preference of design language, but haven't tried since. I should give it another go.

Mint feels dated to me after using KDE Plasma 6 (which is now my favorite)

I've been on BSPWM for nearly 2 years now. Custom scripts and keybindings all over the place. My workflow is so customized and keyboard centric with this TWM. Vim bindings in the terminal, Vimium in the browser, and a heavily customized Neovim Text Editor with Espanso Text expander global keybindings every where... Not to mention a 55 key split Ortholinear Keyboard with custom firmware...yeah... My hands almost never touch my mouse except to game.

Also KDE here, but largely without modifications from defaults. I turn off a few things, but more or less it's exactly what i expect from a DE without taking up too many resources. I really buy in to the K-suite apps for almost everything too, so it all works together nicely.

Xfce lover here. I tried Cinnamon for a bit and it is impressive, but I then moved to KDE on wayland. It's better than I thought. I decided to leave it almost not customized, just the panel on top and a couple of widgets. The thing with KDE, for me, is that you can't not love the developers for all the things they try to do and all the improvements they always bring. It's an impressive work. So, xfce on xorg and kde on wayland is my way to go. I'm not a fan of Gnome. It looks good at first, but after a bit I realize that simply it's not for me, not even the way it looks.

I've been using dwm for well over 10 years now.. It just works, does what I want. Super easy to extend as well, and I can only blame myself for any bugs.

I would say aesthetically always preferred gnome but my laptop which is pretty low end ran slow on it. Kde is in that ballpark for my laptop in terms slowdowns but for the most part it floated through. That was when I used like manjaro.

But I moved on to antix for stability. It has icewm that they configured for the distro. I loved it.

Due to some hardware issue I tested out other distros to see if it was hardware issue or not. Currently my laptop has gnome on it I think.

I've used herbstluftwm on my main desktop for years. Love it. Manual tiling works well for me. Totally flexible and customizable. Switch between floating and tiling with a keypress, etc.

And then on various other machines.

• Xfce on my desktop at work that I don't use that much (work mainly from home) and just needed to set up quick. It's totally fine, like xfce always is.
• Gnome on my tablet (basically a Surface knock-off). I don't really like gnome, but it's the only thing I've tried that works well OOTB for a touchscreen.
• PekWM on an old macbook running debian. Great stacking WM. Super flexible, and the tabbed windows for any app are cool.
• LXQT on an ancient (2009?) dual-core laptop that I mainly just use for writing in nvim. Works well for a simple setup.

GNOME with a bunch of extensions and themes. It looks and works way better than Plasma, which I've tried, and I find the UI too crowded and unpolished.

Gnome on laptops (gestures just work really well!) and KDE on desktop. Although I don’t use half of the customisation features of KDE

I like KDE. But when I need x11 or something lighter weight, I use budgie.

Im a KDE-Opensuse Jihadist

Fluxbox.

As minimal or extreme as one desires.

Along with Slackware, it's my type of K.I.S.S.

Hyperland. Nice, simple, and looks good.

Having successfully convinced me to move away from Xfce after GNOME 2 was deprecated, my main DE has been MATE for such a long time. However, I am being wooed by KDE Plasma lately. I remember running Plasma 5.26 on Slackware 15-current and was blown away at how snappy it was on an old Dell Latitude E6410 with a 1st-gen Core i5 520M! I can only imagine how nice Plasma 6.x is in comparison.

MATE has also been stable for me on the BSD side, running it on OpenBSD and FreeBSD, but Plasma might woo me away on there as well, especially once Plasma 6 is available on OpenBSD 7.6.

I also prefer to run Fluxbox on much less powerful hardware, regardless of the OS it's on.

I use kde6+Wayland. I do like the simplicity of Cinnamon, but it runs games slower than kde, even though mangohud claims they run at the same speed. For example, in Cinnamon it'll say 60fps when it's clearly in the 30s-40s, and kde actually runs the same thing at 60fps. This is with every tweak i could find, and yes, including turning on the setting to turn off compositing during games.

Kde6 is still quite buggy at times, but I'm really enjoying Wayland's smoother general behavior over x11, even with x11 stuff like wine/proton. This is on arch + AMD rx 6600 xt. I used old gnome 2, then mate, then Cinnamon for years, but if KDE can clean itself up a little bit (no judgment tho, i get it) it may be my permanent DE. Generally when i go to report a bug, it's already reported by someone else...

I never liked KDE in the old days, but now it's the only choice in my mind.

If I had to pick a backup, probably xfce.

I like Sway, it obviously needs a bit of configuration to be useful, but that's partly what I like about it, and using a distro like Guix (Nix configured with Lisp) makes it easy to have the same settings on multiple PCs. Otherwise I like GNOME; it's well supported and has many good apps. Touch/touchpad support is really good as well.

XFCE I find a little tricky to get tiling working right

Just replace xfwm4 with i3wm for example. That and the fact you can use most Xfce tools outside of Xfce is why it's my favourite.

I currently use Sway primarily. On my work machine, I have to use Zoom, so I use i3 on X1q which acts/feels virtually identical to Sway. (Or rather, the other way around. Sway was made to be a Wayland compositor drop-in replacement for i3 which has been around for a long time.)

I've been an user of XFCE4 for a decade now. It just works, easy to set up, low-resource impact.