Linux

I have KDE Plasma, Hyprland, and Mango (WM) installed.

Of the three, I use Mango most of the time, and KDE Plasma sometimes. Hyprland, I've kept because most of my config was for it, and I'm still currently porting them to Mango. Most of the dotfiles are in their own areas, though I've mostly piggybacked on Plasma components. One area that I've got some trouble with is program theming. KDE Plasma has its own, Qt has its own (which is different from the KDE Plasma one), and GTK is yet another. I've decided that the best way to deal with it is to make them look as similar as I can, so that whether I'm on Mango, Hyprland, or KDE Plasma, my programs will look the same--except for the presence of window titlebars, which Mango doesn't show, Hyprland shows via a plugin, but KDE Plasma does show.

I used Ubuntu's implementation of Gnome back when I started dabbling with Linux some time ago. I didn't bother theming it. And then I moved to XFCE when that underpowered machine I was using couldn't handle Ubuntu's Gnome without feeling like it's swimming in molasses. XFCE is nice and configurable in contrast, and I didn't have much to complain about. However, I found its configuration back then to be quite troublesome, especially as I tried tweaking my own bars and panels.

I then moved to KDE Plasma when I got my current machine. It was pretty okay out of the box, but coming from a tweaked XFCE, I couldn't stop myself from theming it to my liking. Hyprland was introduced to me mid-2024, and I was thrust head-first into configuring it from scratch, no dotfiles to copy from, or pre-made shells to make my experience easier.

At present, Mango won me over by having a decent vertical scrolling layout, as well as the flexibilty of using other layouts on the fly. While I like Hyprland's level of polish and customizability, and recently have implemented scrolling (both vertical and horizontal), I am staying with Mango if only because I've already done the work porting most of my stuff there.

Cinnamon

I use mainly StumWM, a tiling window manager which uses concepts very similar to Emacs. For example, one can define key chords, bind keys to lisp functions, and auto-generate input for a program window.

If it isn't available, I use i3, or occasionally GNOME.

TDE. Solid, familiar, stays out of my way.

i3

With alacritty, qutebrowser, neovim and LibreWolf. I use my custom dmenu-based utilities for things like launching apps, locking (with slock), controlling (ie. postponing :D) redshift and music player and opening bookmarks, links and searches. Thunar is the most DE-like app I use but being comfortable with Bash i use Thunar just for certain tasks like organizing files like photos. (For quick text edits, I sometimes prefer Mousepad. For screenshots it's slock+maim.)

I don't "rice", I just set some color schemes years ago and use simple wallpaper (which I rarely see.) And keep everything as minimal and out of way as possible.

(I don't care about Wayland unless I'm somehow forced to. I mean, some of my utils depend on X11 for things like clipboard access but I suppose it could be fixed easily nowadays. However X11 works fine for me so if it ain't broken...)

XFCE with Compiz with all the 3D effects enabled lol.

If you want wayland then wayfire is supposed to be the spiritual successor, but it's still technically beta software.

sway. I tried hyprland, but it was unable to switch between different maximized windows (monocle layout). There was a way, but it triggered a resize on every window switch, which was slow and annoying. I don't know if it's perhaps been fixed since then.

People tend to dislike this, but I LOVE gnome. It runs a lil heavy, but damn it's clean, smooth, fast, easy & decluttered.

No dot files, no config, and it's intuitive

KDE Plasma but mainly I use sway.

Sway, it's fast, pretty, easy to customize, and can do headless displays to stream with Sunshine.

Vanilla KDE on desktop, Niri WM+Noctalia shell on laptop. Firstly, because for some reason I cannot get any touchpad gestures to work on KDE, and secondly because the niri paradigm of horizontal tiling is just perfect for a laptop. I tried to use Gnome for a while before landing on Niri, but the lack of configurability and the reliance on extensions for basic functionality drove me nuts.

KDE. I don't even do much to customize it. I think it looks pretty good out of the box.

Lightly customized KDE plasma, it truly is just the best de out there. However when I'm feeling a bit playful and not looking to do actual work or using my laptop without a mouse I do switch over to hyprland sometimes.

KDE Plasma because I'm basic and I wanna get stuff done 👍

KDE Plasma. It's clean, fast, and just works.

I use KDE. I like how easy it is to customize pretty much everything. Like, if I want everything to be green, I can make everything green and no one can stop me.

I really want to like Cosmic but there are too many usability papercuts for me at the moment, so Gnome it is.

https://github.com/conformal/spectrwm

Super minimal, and gets out of my way. I've been using it for over a decade

Cosmic. It's still a little buggy but getting better.

KDE, but only with an extension called kröhnkite for auto tiling. To me a manual stacked window management system is almost unusable. As someone who used tiling window managers for years and lots of KDE based applications, and as KDE was one of the first who worked well in Wayland, I thought to give it a shot. I like it and since then (years by now) stayed on KDE.

For reference, I used Gnome 2 on Ubuntu, made the switch to Unity desktop, then Gnome 3 (and I think Gnome 4 too?, don't remember). Then started experimenting with Regolith, auto tiling for Gnome, and tried out real tiling window managers, until I landed on qtile. Then experimented with Xfce, before finally making the switch to KDE (because of Wayland). Rest is history.

KDE Plasma, as it’s most Windows-like and it has lots of cool widgets to add to your desktop Windows 7-style.

I’ve also tried Gnome, but I found it confusing and honestly a bit annoying. Not being able to properly minimise like I’m used to just really throws me off. I do think the visual style is well-designed, though.

I’ve tried Cinnamon as well. I thought it looked a bit too cheap for my taste, at least by default on Mint.

I've been a GNOME user ever since I made the switch to Linux. Though, like literally over the last couple of days, I've been DE/WM-hopping.

The first address was Sway, but it felt (kinda) archaic... And while I'm positive that I'd be able to make it work, I wasn't entirely sure if it was worth the effort 😅.

So, not long after, I couldn't bear it anymore and switched to COSMIC. So far, I'm pretty content with it. GNOME required about half a dozen extensions to properly bend to my will. With COSMIC, it pretty much gets there without any external add-ons.

GNOME. I love the workspace management and simplicity

KDE (on CachyOS)

Niri + Noctalia shell. I find the scrolling tiles to be excellent for my workflow, and the desktop shell feels nice and polished. Plus, Niri supports the Wayland zwlr_layer_shell, which means I can finally use Wallpaper Engine; there's even a Noctalia plugin for it.

Niri has been great for gaming and streaming, so be sure to check it out if you haven't.

I would be hesitant to use anything but KWin with Plasma. They were designed together as a set (like Mutter and Gnome), and I suspect replacing the WM would be no small task.

Cosmic on PC.

KDE Plasma on laptop.

Xfce, specifically because I like the Chicago95 theme.

Gnome

I'm using gnome.

Really enjoyed sway but lacked the integration I wanted, KDE before plasma 6 would break all the time and I liked but again lacked integration niri (a scrolling window manager)

running plain gnome on my main machine and xfce on my older one, but might try singularity or cosmic when I get some time

DE: none

WM: Sway on my orange pi 5 max and hyprland on my x86_64 PC.

kde + wayland on tumbleweed. Wanted to try other things, went for swaywm. NowI found out that krunner and kdeconnect are like 90% of what i need an OS (DE) to do.

I use Cinnamon, it’s not much, but it just works.

KDE + Wayland, only changes I made were moving the bar to the left side, changing the applications menue icon, and changing the color of breeze dark to pink

I'm running a headless server with no WM or DE. It's all CLI just like boomers did it with multics and unix. No pretty pictures, no wasted cycles on rendering nonsense. Just pure, unadulterated computation.

Gnome with the Forge extension for window tiling

KDE Plasma with default settings as well.