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

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.

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.

KDE Plasma all the way, on the desktop, the laptops and the two set top boxes.

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.

Xfce, specifically because I like the Chicago95 theme.

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

Gnome

I'm on Mango, and it's amazing for me. It's well documented, as well as extremely flexible. I love it.

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 slop+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...)

KDE (on CachyOS)

Niri

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.

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.

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

hyprland

Stock GNOME. No extensions.

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

Been on i3wm for 3 4 years now I guess. Also work with sway on some systems.

you can actually see and use my config

https://codeberg.org/alirezaalavi/dotfiles

Sway

Enlightenment DE

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.

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.

Sway and Gnome

The latter is mostly for other family members. But I like both.

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)

WM: i3, sway, also playing around with dwm

DE: Xfce

I just need basic functionality, and most tiling WMs are fairly similar. i3 vs. Sway is basically the Xorg vs. Wayland question. I like dwm for its absolute minimalism and the fact that you configure it by editing or patching C and recompiling.

Gnome with the Forge extension for window tiling

Running mangowm on AerynOS.

KDE Plasma with default settings as well.

Cosmic.

Openbox was my favourite, but there's not a really good Wayland alternative yet so I've stuck with KDE for years.

I wanted to try Cosmic so I went to the source with popos and it's really a good time. I haven't used a Deb/Ubuntu base since the Crunchbang days but this is good and it seems there is a Cosmic update pushed through every week.

Cinnamon

Sway, me like simple.

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

GNOME

Using kde rn because its easy to use.

I will spend some time to get a tiling wm eventually. Minimal resource efficiency as well as brain efficiency is very apealing to me.

Arch linux + niti + dms, amazing!

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.

Hyprland, specifically with the end4 illogical impulse desktop.

It's pretty and I really like how functional it is, but some recent updates have changed how some of the config files work requiring changes. It's an inconvenience I'm willing to put up with though.

For fun? Niri + Noctalia.

For actually using the computer efficiently? KDE Plasma.

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.

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.

Mate 👍

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

Cinnamon. It's like a combination of kde and gnome.

I am sorry if my English is bad.

Cinnamon. Desktop UI peaked in the Gnome 2/Windows XP era and anything after that is bloat for the sake of bloat.

Might try kde plasma though, if I can make it behave the same.

If i have to pick one i'd say River. I have a bunch of tiling compositors configured but find myself coming back to River the most. It feels stable, it's minimal, but still supports the wayland protocols you'd want to be there, and is fairly simple to configure with its shell script config file.

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

I use the pop!_os customized version of GNOME currently. I used hyprland for a while until I lost my dots for it due to some PC issues, and I didn't bother setting it back up. I do plan to switch to COSMIC which I quite enjoy, but it's also still missing a lot of stuff I need, so im waiting for that to be fully rolled out

Still on Openbox/Xorg. Inevitable is the switch to wayland, what is the closest equivalent? And if you use it, how is it?

edit: for me, OB's greates strength is having tons of options for manual tiling while still being a stacking window manager. Plus tons of keyboard shortcuts and inbuilt menus.

KDE Plasma but mainly I use sway.

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.

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

I’m a simple man. Default Gnome on my desktop, i3 on my low end laptop. I don’t even really use the DE-ness of Gnome, I’m just too lazy to bother switching. On my laptop I also don’t even really need i3. kmscon + tmux would probably be fine except for those few times when I have to use a full browser for some stupid logon permissions or QR code jank.