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

Kde plasma for all the reasons you hate it for 😂

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

KDE Plasma.

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Gnome for its looks, simplicity and intuitive ways, but after Plasma 6 release, KDE seems to be up par with Gnome’s UI/UX so at the moment Plasma ia my favourite desktop.

As for WMs I tried i3, Sway, and Hyprland. Overall Hyprland is my favourite because of its special workspace mechanics, customization and options. But if looks had no value to you and you like Sway’s scratchpad mechanic then sway is for you (plus its documentation is mostly clearer, better organized and well written than Hyprland). Btw I am not comparing their tiling because there are use cases for each person and you can acomplish each others tiling mode with plugins.

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 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.

Whoa, but the comma splice.

Are we doing popularity contests here?

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

Moksha DE is also good one. Budgie feels more bettter for new users than Cinnamon

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 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…

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 : it’s the only DE where I can have 2 identical panels (app pined+ full system tray) on each of my 2 screens without installing extensions.

KDE can do what I want without having to look for extensions. Breeze theme is good enough for me, I don’t need to look for something else. So far it’s the best out of the box experience I had.

I prefer Gnome look, but I distr’hop too often to have the courage to setup the desktop every time.