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I'm a big fan of tiling WMs. Even though in the past I did try GNOME/KDE, I never really sticked because I wanted a more bare-bones experience to learn how to configure the system via command line.

At first, I tried i3, then switched to dwm as using a real programming language for configuration felt more liberating. Unfortunately, it also didn't work out because I quickly stumbled upon patches incompatibilities and it was a nightmare to debug.

As a result, here I am, running AwesomeWM. Getting used to millions of keybindings was painful, but it was certainly worth it because ~~nobody can use my computer now~~ to me it's really convenient to do everything with a keyboard.

I've only tried a few of them.

For mint, I went with XFCE and Cinnamon.

For the lightweight Linux distros, I just went with whatever was bundled with them. None of them stood out, which is probably by design.

Tried KDE as well, and its customization options just blew me away. I always use it now for desktop installations.

Gnome, of course, on anything with a trackpad. I hate trackpads with a passion so I look for DEs that would make using them less painful.

Are we including WMs? I've only tried I3WM, Qtile, and (iirc) awesome, I'm awful with WMs so I can't really stay with them for long. My productivity takes a dive lol.

I'm a KDE guy through and through now. GNOME has a better workflow in my opinion, but the stronghanding isn't something I'm a fan of. KDE doesn't try to fight me as much and has taken some cues from GNOME (e.g. the window viewer being hot-cornered to the h

I've tried Cinnamon, and it's a good starting point for Windows users but the plugin store needs more love from them. MATE + Compiz is a good combo but Compiz is very much on its way out, I'm hoping MATE has a good compositor when they move to Wayland (or they use Wayfire). I'll use XFCE if I need something more lightweight.

DE? My typewriter can't print GUIs and if it coud it's just bloat. /s
I don't really need DEs. A WM and at most a taskbar is all I need. But I use xfce on my main machine because I installed it when setting up the os and it doesn't annoy me with features I don't want, so I never bothered switching to something else.

my arch computer has DWM, and on this one i'm running bone-stock cinammon

Ok, I will actually start this time.

I been basically just using Cinnamon for the past 8 years. Since I used it for so long it is super familiar with it, I know where to find anything I possibly need and I can set it up the way I like in about 2 minutes. So it is just very comfortable for me to use it. And why change it if it works right?

Other than that the only thing I really tried (as in I used for more than a few days) was KDE and I hated it which was very disappointing to me because I heard so many people liking it. I had a really hard and confusing time trying to set it up the exact way I wanted and got hit with a nasty bug when the search would just stop working day 2 or 3 of using it. Maybe I just hit a very bad timing when I did but I have no interest trying it again.

I have never found a reason to leave i3. It is good and does what I need. I tried bspwm for a hot minute and there was aspects I liked, but I felt the documentation was lacking. DWM is annoying to patch. I might try out Hyprland when I feel wayland is ready but still there are features that are missing and some will never be present. I am a big fan of X11 Forwarding and am mad people think it is not worth continuing.

I bounce between XFCE and Neon. XFCE is preferred due to the very light weight and “stay out of my way” approach. I love simple. I also keep Neon installed because I like to see where the boundaries are pushed, and I did grow up in the golden age of CompViz / 3D cubes, etc. so I can enjoy chrome and rice when I see it 😂

I use KDE. The workflow I've kept almost completely vanilla aside from shortcuts and the always on top button. The rest is minor theming, like changing is the accent color. I started a custom icon theme that I may come back to, but it's nothing much (all I've really changed is the minecraft launcher to be a bee 🤣).

I use KDE just cause everything just works, and there's always been an easy setting for me to simply toggle. And despite all the settings I feel I've been able to find what I need just fine.

There was one point in time that I did try customizing the workflow of Plasma. It was pretty fun coming up with some crazy ones but in the end it didn't really jive with me. If I do come back to changing the workflow I think I'd like to make a couple global themes to switch between a Plasma/MacOS/Unity layout. It's fun to switch it up sometimes ✨

KDE for years now. Shit just works and you can customize crap out of it. I used Awesome previously, but I am too old for tha stuff now. Life is too short.