Xfce

I’ve daily driven every major DE except KDE (GNOME, Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon) and I always ended up switching back to xfce. I’m not a fan of GNOME’s workflow and since it’s not that customizable without extensions, that made me switch from it very quickly. I used Cinnamon on Mint for a few months and while the experience was mostly fine, it sometimes felt a bit laggy. As for MATE, while I love the GNOME 2 layout and it’s a relatively lightweight DE, I encountered plenty of visual bugs there and I could very easily replicate that GNOME 2 layout on Xfce (without a system menu, but still).

KDE Plasma and I refuse to use anything else on Linux unless there’s no choice.

KDE Plasma. I just like it. It seems to have options to do what I want, for the most part. There’s some things I wish it had, like a way to programmatically get the active window under Wayland, so StreamController could automatically change pages.

KDE Plasma 5.

It’s default on Slackware =P

KDE Plasma. I am not good with making edits/tweaks to desktop environments and really like how MX has it set up.

Nobody uses cinnamon? Honestly - I really like using cinnamon with Debian. I heard that they promised not to fuck with the UI for no reason unlike… everyone! @Mwa Cinnamon is a fairly nice, easy to use desktop - I don’t really care which is better, but if they change it, you have to re-learn it. Top tip for UI design - don’t think that your users want to re-learn how to interact with your UI - they might go outside, or elsewhere.

gnome currently because nearly everything i use is designed for gnome and looks mismatched on other DEs. but the gnome workflow largely feels like a prison.

Wood. Usually medium density particle board.

On my main laptop I use KDE, it’s smooth and gets the job done. On my tablet, I use GNOME. It runs well, and is touch-optimized. On my other laptop, I use gnome for no particular reason.

I’m an XFCE guy. I find XFCE to be nice and fast. It’s decently light - not the absolute lightest, but most of its installation size is from dependencies you were going to install anyway like GTK.

For now, it’s still on xorg, but I think they’re working on it.

Xfce

Xfce4.

y tho

It’s inexpensive on resources while leaving me nothing to really… need extra, I suppose. It’s old so there’s thousands of themes and ways to set it up, and it just feels like home. The speed of the animations and defaults to everything has a very stock Windows XP feel to the desktop despite it looking like nearly anything. The system doesn’t get in the way of programs from other desktops or setups in mind and always steps aside.

I have two, KDE on my laptop that runs Arch (btw) which is my tinkering machine, and GNOME/Pop!_OS on the desktop, which is the one other people use and I’m not allowed to break lol.

Although I might switch the desktop to COSMIC at some point if it doesn’t cause too much trouble.

KDE, it does what I want it to do.

KDE. Because of its simplicity. Unsarcastically.

KDE. It’s customizable without adding lots of weirdness. It’s got a solid set of included tools like Dolphin and Konsole. It’s generally very stable and visually attractive.

No shade to other DEs. I’ve tried lots of them, I even have a couple of alternative DEs I’ll log into when they are useful (i3 is great if I am doing something repetitive). But KDE is just the most comfortable for me for daily use.

The non-Gnome COSMIC DE that System76 has been developing is looking really promising though. I have the alpha on a spare laptop and find it very functional.