Linux

CWM, calm window manager. It's based off Plan 9's Rio and made for OpenBSD, there is a Linux port. I also admit I use KDE sometimes.

XFCE and well, straightforward usage without endless tweaking and customization. On the other side, I recently(~2 years:)) felt in love with tiling window manager BSPWM and keyboard-driven usage.

Lxqt, with pcmanfm's desktop ability turned off. I use the terminal for my file management anyway

I usually have several terminal tabs and web browser tabs open plus a tmux session. Neovim for coding and writing, feh and mpv for viewing media, mpd, supysonic, and minidlna for streaming and playing music.

I went cold turkey to gnome and I use KDE on my laptop. Both configured to use super + type in what I want to open. I quit windows since I got used to it and they stopped providing it. I like both but gnome is way more finished while kde feels a bit janky at times. I really love the customization ability of KDE and I find once I messed up and had to reinstall once, I got over my urges to needlessly rice. I don't know if it is distro specific but I am pretty upset fedora gnome does not have create new file under right click but you have to use terminal (goes completely against gnome philosophy) or to go edit hidden folders and use terminal to create a template (goes very against gnome philosophy).

I've used several over the years, but right now I'm enjoying Hyprland. UWSM is also working well for session management.

SwayWM

KDE Plasma and it's configured to have everything in the same places as Windows as much as possible. I have to use Windows for work and gaming and like it when I don't have to think much about which computer I'm using right now.

My memory is foggy but ive used xfce for a long while, then switched to i3gaps with void linux. stopped using linux cuz they couldn't locate the developer or something( like we didn't get updates for half a year 0_o)

... I ended up forgetting how to use i3. I dont know what the community uses nowadays but my god i3 was AMAZING. It felt like a caveman that just learned how to make fire- and it was a big fucking fire.

I reaaaaally want to use i3 again but do not want to spend the time relearning everything. Highly recommend it though.

After a lot of jumping around I settled for Plasma, with just the default dark theme plus a few minor tweaks and that's it. It's super easy to use and it runs pretty smoothly now unlike 5+ years ago. I was into the whole tiling wm rabbithole for a while but got bored of it and I mostly just want everything fullscreen so I wasn't even making use of the tiling.

Started with Gnome, then i3, Hyprland and now Sway. Gnome not being designed around customisability made me switch to i3. Hyprland has had some stability issues and regressions that annoyed me and so I switched to Sway. Thinking of trying out river at some point.

Here's mine, simple and functional

Tried i3 a few years back. Never went back. Fucking love it. Would like to ditch X for Wayland soon though. Need to move to Sway but a bunch of scripts depend on X.. Probably wouldn't be too much of a nightmare to transition, but for some reason I've been putting it off for years.

ive used many de's and wm's over the last 15+ years and ended using gnome the most. most familiar with it now so, its fine for me.

I use Mate on my laptop; before that I used Cinnamon.

To be honest, DEs are basically terminal window managers for me. If I didn't need a graphical web browser for everything I do (because that's basically what software is these days - shit you log into from a web browser) I'd probably be using GNU Screen or possibly Twin to manage multiple shells instead.

If the drag-and-drop functionality of modern DEs wasn't so helpful I'd probably still be using twm because I like stuff that does what I need, and otherwise stays out of my way.

KDE has given me the desktop I need for the past few years. Hyprland isn't a desktop environment, as far as I know.

Before KDE I used Cinnamon on Linux Mint. It was functional, but after many years I wanted a change.

Use whatever suits your needs. In my experience, KDE and Cinnamon are the most complete desktop environments without having to install extensions or extra software. Both are mature, have large communities behind them, and release incremental updates frequently. Those are my criteria for a good desktop environment.

KDE is the easiest for coming from Windows, you almost never never need the command line or anything "extra" to customize it (beyond what even Windows will allow).

GNOME (especially in Ubuntu) by default is more Macintosh-like which might appeal to some people, it's "simpler" but any customizations will require navigating the add-ons (and in my experience inevitably the command line too).

I think KDE is the one for most people who just want a functioning PC. GNOME could be good for the PC you might make for your parent. Bonus points for an immutable distro which are even harder to break.

I use Cosmic and really like it- have used i3, Awesome and Gnome in the past for a while too, I really likes them.

The most time I spent with a set up was Awesome + rofi, which I really enjoyed. I customised literally everything and spent hours tweaking stuff.

That was super fun, but in all honesty my workflow is more or less:

1. Open up a terminal (alacritty, tmux + fish shell + helix editor)
2. Open up a browser (Firefox, have played with others but there's always some quirk where I give up)
3. That's it.

Honestly, all the tweaking is fun for me, but with my workflow I have like 0 requirements for anything fancy. Daily driving cosmic is going nicely for now, and seems to mostly get out of my way.

old school here, started with X Terminal and motif (mwm) and played with twm of fvwm last century. I have always like Xfwm/Xfce because it is simple and it works. I have the start menu/quick launches, the button bar where windows appears, and the icon area, a little bit like windows 95. No icons on my desktop.

KDE.

Mostly like Windows 7, but I recently moved the dock to the top.

I use Xfce with a swap of the window manager by Bspwm. I got the easy to configure Xfce status bar (instead of things like polybar and others...) and also the Xfce terminal, file manager... The window title is written to the status bar. I use Super + B/N to switch the workspaces. Some apps are set to floating mode like the image viewer, the calculator... So everything can be displayed in a good tiling WM and I don't need to manipulate windows.

I just recently switched to using the COSMIC alpha, coming from KDE on my personal laptop and from GNOME on my work laptop. I absolutely love it. It's very stable and polished for still being in alpha.

I really like its tiling and workspaces. The navigation just feels very natural to me. I am a very big fan of keyboard only navigation.

Since both of my laptops have hybrid graphics, I am also a fan of COSMIC's approach to hybrid graphics, that it generally let's you quite easily specify if you want to run an app on dGPU or iGPU.

And last of all it just looks gorgeous.

GNOME on my laptop, using the trackpad. Three-finger swipe up to switch tasks/search. Two-finger tap for context menus. Three-finger tap for things like opening in a new tab, or closing a tab. Simple, intuitive, efficient, comfortable.

Desktop environment? What desktop environment?

KDE and I keep it mostly stock. I usually get a compact desktop pager widget and add a kwin plugin to dynamically add/remove virtual desktops.

Cinnamon, Feels like Gnome done right,it's stable,customizable,Mehh resource intensive. Sadly no HDR AND VRR and a bit messy underneath the hood but I can use gamescope for HDR and VRR and i kinda wish the extension ecosystem was great. My workflow idk but I rarely use gtile actions like Send to kde connect and file converting is useful.