Linux

Sway and dmenu when in a keyboard productivity sorta mood, KDE otherwise.

Although I use sway, I used KDE for a long time and XFCE prior. They're both phenomenal. I'd love to see XFCE make its way to wayland in the future.

As an aside, I feel like Wayland has a market ripe for the introduction of lightweight DEs. Sure, it has the very lightweight (hyprland, sway, river, dwl) and heavyweight (KDE, Gnome) but nothing between like XFCE, LXDE or MATE

Budgie is cool

@fugepe I can live with KDE, Cinnamon, Xfce, Gnome, Lxqt., Mate... I am using KDE right now but I like Xfce more than others...

KDE - using it with Manjaro now, but also used it on Mint before that.

Not a DE but AwesomeWM. I like its default aesthetic and it's highly extensible using Lua which gives a lot of power to the user.

Xfce overall, but I like MATE a lot as well. Just give me a traditional desktop experience, I don't need mobile-like options on a desktop.

I actually switched to MATE primarily because I like its suite of software a bit more (calculator, file manager, file archiver) than Xfce's, though I use some of MATE's stuff (Caja mainly) on Xfce on my laptop.

I like Gnome. It is very usable out of the box and requires the least amount of work to get it to my liking. I am current running pop_os' cosmic version of gnome though I also enjoyed vanilla-ish(that is with 2-3 extensions) version of gnome with fedora. If only mutter starts officially supporting vrr when using wayland

KDE + Latte dock is what I use. Very simple and minimalistic setup with no widgets.

KDE + bismuth

Xfce, Gnome or just a WM like Sway.

I keep wanting to try out vanillaOS and everytime I liveboot it, I immediately regret my decision. I cannot stand Gnome.
I love KDE, I love it for how versatile, intuitive and customizable it is.
Bot to mention, I rarely experience any bugs. It just works.

I'm not huge into customising desktop environments, so when I've tried window managers like i3, I typically only get it functional to my likings and then realise how boring I am compared to how others use it.

So typically I use gnome or kde, but I like cinnamon and xfce as well. I don't really have a favourite, they're all good. At the minute I am trying to adopt wayland and have been using gnome while I do that.

i3wm at work and at home

BSPWM and Polybar because I am too lazy to figure out eww and I use KDE as a backup in case anything breaks lol

Enlightenment

For me efficiency and less eye strain is important. I want my eyes to be at the center of the screen for the majority of my session. Gnome is my goto for that reason but any tiling windows manager would do as welll.

KDE and the windows start bar lookalikes constantly have your eyes going to the corner or sides to open and find apps.

I'm a Gnome user, with a few extensions but mostly vanilla.

xfce if i had to run a desktop environment, but i usually stick with dwm and haven't got around to trying wayland yet

I personally like Mate, especially with i3 as the window manager.

Kde for the win!

xfce

Xfce, didn't try KDE yet, using gnome currently.

I don't have a favorite. I use Cinnamon because it disappoints me the least.

My very first WM was Blackbox, back in 2000, and I imprinted on it like a baby duck, so today I still mostly use Fluxbox. It's abandoned and unmaintained, but still works (for now). It's very minimalist and lightweight. When it finally dies completely I guess I'll finally learn how to use a tiling WM.

(I use Gnome on a laptop with a HiDPI screen, because that was too annoying to configure correctly on Fluxbox. It's... fine. I added a bunch of customisations and it mostly stays out of my way, which is what I want in an environment.)

No matter what WM/DE I use, I always add a dropdown / "quakelike" terminal application -- I previously used Yakuake, but switched to Guake. It uses a hotkey to show / hide a terminal (and you can use multiple tabs, and multiplexers inside the tabs). I can't live without this, and I highly recommend it if you often find yourself hunting around for your terminal window.

I have a hard time recommending it, but I ran Deepin on Arch a few years and was blown away by it. There were some weird limitations to how much you can customize, and I prefer window managers in general, so I eventually stopped using it. But that was the best time I had with a DE in Linux overall.

The best I can actually recommend is KDE.

I have been using cinnamon for many years. For the last 2 y it is xfce for me.

Simple, reliable and stable, low in resources, does the work well.

Pop_OS underneath with Regolith (basically a pre-configured i3) on top.

SwayFX (Sway with a bit more eye candy effects)

Been a gnome guy for the past ~13 years with a bit of unity thrown in back when it was relevant! I've tried to love KDE repeatedly over the years but it's never quite clicked with me - the customisation is great, but using it just feels kinda wrong personally!

I use Gnome at work and KDE at home. I like the workflow in Gnome and the customization of KDE.

@fugepe Gnome

I'm super torn on desktop environments. There simply are too many great choices! I like XFCE, KDE Plasma and the most recent Gnome versions - for different reasons. KDE is the perfect choice when you want the full shiny, modern, bling desktop and if you love to customize it in all kinds of ways that are possible out of the box. When I spend time with KDE, over the course of weeks, I keep constantly changing my wallpapers, themes, cursors, icons, colors, etc. - just for the sake of variety. With KDE, the desktop never gets boring.

BUT... I also love minimalism (to a tasteful, practical extent) and classic retro computing, as well as efficiency. That's why XFCE is very comfy to me. It only has the features you need, but still to the extent of a nice and fully featured desktop environment. Doesn't eat too many system resources, still can look very pretty with themes, does what it's supposed to. Very stable, too. There are times when KDE just feels cluttered and ... too much for me, then I retreat to XFCE.

I'm running Fedora Silverblue for quite a while now and although I always had my gripes about modern Gnome... after using it for a while, it really grew on me. Since version 42, modern Gnome really is going the right direction. It's nicely clean and readable, modern, performant, and once you get used to it, its different approach to the workflow really makes sense. The apps are lovely, they do one thing and do it well, and they're beautifully integrated in the same design language. There's a wonderful collection of apps called Gnome Circle, these are not developed directly by the Gnome team, but endorsed by them, as they're useful and integrate perfectly into the UI design language. There's some amazing tools in there! It all feels very unified, and with the Blur-my-shell extension, you don't need much else for a pretty look. The only downside is that this clean look sometimes is achieved by cutting poweruser features, which can be frustrating when you bump into something you need to do, but the UI doesn't account for. For example, I have multiple bluetooth adapters in this PC and can't select which one to use. Still, great desktop.

Boring old X11 Gnome for me, it looks pretty, it's reliable and it has all the stuff I'd expect out of a desktop environment

Wayland doesn't play nice with my GPU and I've heard it's not great for gaming anyway