Vanilla Gnome. It’s simple/boring, and I like that. It seems like most people that like Gnome don’t care that it’s not a poweruser DE, and aren’t excited to talk about it either.

KDE

For aesthetics: Budgie, with Cinnamon a close second For simplicity and speed: XFCE

Vanilla Gnome Shell. I know it’s heresy, but I’ve been using it since beta and I actually enjoy the work flow.

GNOME, with a little bit of extension customisability!

Sway or GNOME (Wayland) with Pop shell extension.

dwm, I got too much used to “it just works” and never ever breaks afrer an update.

Debian/KDE

i3 counts, right? I have always been a keyboard oriented user and a big part of what drove me from Windows is them breaking or changing the hotkeys I used regularly. To me it is the perfect “you have control, this is your device, it works and looks how you want.” wm

Default GNOME (Wayland), it just works

GNOME, for sure. It works out of the box, and it’s kind of pretty out of the box.

I also tried it on a touch screen PX and it works surprisingly well.

I usually use WindowMaker or FVWM but as a desktop environment… CDE

KDE Plasma on desktop

Cinnamon on (older lower spec) laptop

Seems like I’m the outlier here that prefers Gnome over KDE. Gnome feels more polished than KDE for me. Granted KDE comes with more features out of the box, but I don’t find anything lacking in Gnome for me.

Tried KDE long time ago to compare it to Gnome 3, went back to Gnome. Tried KDE again a few months ago to compare to Gnome 42, came back to Gnome again.

I also can’t stand having all my programs’ name starting with K.