Linux

Gnome

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

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

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

Cinnamon

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.

Vanilla gnome is pretty peak

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

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.

I use mainly StumpWM, a tiling window manager which uses concepts very similar to Emacs. For example, one can define key chords, bind keys to lisp functions, and auto-generate input for a program window.

If it isn't available, I use i3, or occasionally GNOME.

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.

KDE (on CachyOS)

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

GNOME. I love the workspace management and simplicity

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.

Hyprland, trying to go back to sway.

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

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)

Dank Linux w niri over cachyos gnome.

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.

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

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.

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.

KDE Plasma with default settings as well.

KDE Plasma but mainly I use sway.

Running mangowm on AerynOS.

Gnome with the Forge extension for window tiling

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.

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.

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.

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.

I really want to like Cosmic but there are too many usability papercuts for me at the moment, so Gnome it is.

https://github.com/conformal/spectrwm

Super minimal, and gets out of my way. I've been using it for over a decade