GNOME. Love the simplicity!

Hyprland on my desktop

GNOME on my laptop

After trying mostly everything, I always come back to my "custom desktop": (openbox + xfce4-panel + thunar + xfce4-terminal + dunst) .. for the last 15 years or so. It doesn't get in the way, is fast AF, it takes very very little ram/cpu (4.5 Mb !!) and it has everything I need (even tiling via keyboard). It's VERY customizable and it does as I tell. No crashes, no weirdeness. It just works. I will probably move to labwc in a future, just because.. wayland. And now I'm about to use it on a steam deck... it's gonna be fun.

Enlightenment. It's pretty and really fast. Of course you can't complete with the speed of tile wm. But their development speed is so slow....

None. Openbox WM with Tint2 as a rudimentary system bar, Rofi as launcher.

XFCE as I like the look of the classic Windows layout. Might eventually try out KDE for Wayland support but there's something about the simplicity of XFCE which I love.

Plasma, because I want things to Just Work(TM) and the customizability and modernity are neat. I like right click --> pin to top/bottom as well.

KDE on my main laptop, Cinnamon on the TV-connected mini-PC in my living room. I like the customization options of KDE, and with Cinnamon I just wanted to test out Linux Mint, no big reason other than that. I used GNOME for some time with Pop_OS!, and it was not fully my thing. I plan to test out more DEs when I can free up an older laptop to do some more experimentation - for my main laptop I require stability, so I don't mess around with it too much.

I gave an original Surface Pro tablet and I use Ubuntu's Gnome on it. It's perfect for tablets I find. Not so great for desktop PCs.

For my main workstation and main laptop:

• Cosmic themed GNOME - I just like the way it looks and works without any changes. The basic tiling functions are something I find helpful at times too.
• Plasma 6 - It works pretty well and looks nice. I don't do a lot of customization, so it's not a big deal to me. For my other machines I'm currently using Cinnamon, GNOME, Budgie, and LXDE.

Am I the only one on here using Budgie. I just feel more comfortable with the workflow using Budgie.

KDE Plasma

It was what came on the steam deck lol

Plasma.

When I try Gnome, within a couple minutes I encounter the Save dialog that defaults the cursor to the Search field instead of the Filename field, and the top of my head goes spinning across the room, and I uninstall it.

I'm old, I come from old X11R4 time, motif, mwm, twm, fvwm, things from previous century. In modern Linux I used mostly gnome, and Cinnamon for a few years and tried to love it but cannot, I finally went back to Xfce because it works, it's simple, neat, nice, I have no icon on my desktop, I have a kind of windows 3 setup: a startup menu (and some quick launches), the window bar, the notification area with time etc

I'm using MX Linux for maybe 8 years now with Xfce

updated screenshot:

i use zorin os's gnome with forge, once cosmic comes out ill switch to that

I use Mate. When I first started using a Desktop in addition to terminals, it was with Redhat 6.1, Redhat came with Gnome-2, I got used to it. I didn't like the changes made in Gnome-3, so I switched to Mate which retained, or at least had the option to be configured to look as I was used to it, save for more refined graphics. It also works well remotely so that's another reason I use it as much of my work involves remote acess.

TDE. Functional, stays out of my way, but still reasonably full-featured. The development team is dedicated to adding useful features while keeping the original look and feel, so I don't have to go hunting for settings that have inexplicably moved or changed defaults every time I update. It doesn't support Wayland, but I'm Wayland-neutral (that is, I have nothing against it, but I have nothing against X either).

Currently, Plasma. But I have ADHD a bit, so I’ve gone back and forth between that and Gnome mostly. I do like Cinnamon and I really want to spend time with Xfce and maybe others just to see what feels most comfortable right now. I’m trying to go for keyboard comfort these days, so we’ll see where I land at some point!

It's hard to go back after Sway/I3 with pywal coloration, when everything is so sluggish in comparison. It's amazing to see gnome and KDE adding like a second to launch/quit of common applications. Tried hyprland, but animations seemed choppy (beefy AMD desktop), has that changed?

Xfce. Partly because I've used it for a long time, but mostly because it does what I need it to do and little else.

KDE, because I'm too lazy to switch back to XFCE, which offered every feature I already use in KDE except without the stuttering, the bugs, and the update cycle that breaks things way, way too often on a rolling release distro.

Or openbox. My old laptop has openbox, but that's more for screwing around with EWW than doing day-to-day things.

My favourite that I use lots of places is Gnome. Love using it. Use it completely stock.

I also use KDE, which is fine, but I don’t much care for it, I always find it to be buggy and unreliable. Could well be pebkac errors, but I’ve seen it across multiple machines over the years. With this said I still use kde on one machine.

I also use sway. Which is a wayland window manager. I find it very good. I’ve heard that hyprland is also good, but I’m not looking to mess with a window manager, I just like it to be simple, so I’ve not really tried it.

I use Gnome, but I just wanted to say Cinnamon is fantastic (probably my first choice if I weren't on a laptop)

I'm running MATE on my laptop. It gives me what I need (a task bar, space for some instrumentation, the usual desktop functionality, a way to start applications) and nothing that I don't care about (wobbling windows, compiz, stuff like that). My DE is a tool; I use tools that don't get in my way because I have work to do.

I might give COSMIC a try in a few months, I haven't decided yet.

KDE Plasma.

GNOME kind of looks nice but is too strict on customization.

Gnome.

With NoMachine to my Windows Host, hot keys go to the host as intended.

Rustdesk can't do it in any config and they don't care at this stage.

Sway on a chromebook with 4gb ram, sway on thinkpad t430, xfce on my gf's laptop, and gnome on my gaming rig that will go soon either cosmic or just sway. For me sway is thewinner. Sway with me... Marimba... Lalala

Edit: also gnome on the kichen pc with touch. Gnome is the only one that works fully on touch.