For me its KDE.
I’m not huge into customising desktop environments, so when I’ve tried window managers like i3, I typically only get it functional to my likings and then realise how boring I am compared to how others use it.
So typically I use gnome or kde, but I like cinnamon and xfce as well. I don’t really have a favourite, they’re all good. At the minute I am trying to adopt wayland and have been using gnome while I do that.
FVWM.
Xfce on work desktop, gnome works well with gestures at home on my laptop. Will be changing to kde when I get a new machine at work!
KDE if it was less buggy.
It’s KDE for me too, but I don’t really get the buggy part. Sure kwin crashes sometimes, but that happened to me like 2 or 3 times during my 2 and half years on openSUSE. Other than that I can’t think of something really bugged? Maybe I’m too tolerant, having to work with Windows XP and DOS at work…
Maybe, I had so many frickin kwin crashes every time I tried it, and there is a known bug with fractional scaling in some resolutions which affected me that drove me insane, if you care enough I could try to track it down on the bugtracker and link it.
But yeah, loved it, except for the bugs. I like gnome less, but it’s less buggy, so I’m using that.
I wonder if KDE stability is related to i18n/l10n. I am running desktops in German and KDE crashes for me all the time on freshly installed machines before I even could touch settings. (I tried a lot of KDE versions over the years, from stable/mainstream distributions like Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu). Besides the constant crashing I missed a mail client on the level of Evolution or Thunderbird when I tried KDE.
bspwm + sxhkd, for years. Based on the Manjaro config at first, today it’s my own setup. Even convinced may family. The best!
xfce
I usually use WindowMaker or FVWM but as a desktop environment… CDE
For me it was Enlightenment DR16 (discontinued). you could make themes with shaped borders (transparent regions, buttons and titles anywhere, even overlapping into the window a bit), have it remember window positions, change border style for a window (e.g. drawer, so it can be collapsed sideways) and it would not steal focus. it had really good effects and features. I miss it a lot in Wayland. Check the web for some screenshots, if you want to be inspired.
i3 on my laptop, gnome on my gaming rig (cuz wayland)
I personally like Mate, especially with i3 as the window manager.
XFCE? always that shit is fast and the memory management is better than KDE and Gnome
It may be a sort of shy Tory effect. People don’t volunteer that they run Gnome because it’s seen as the default mainstream option, but if someone uses xmonad, they’re going to tell you about it.
barless dwl, love the simplicity
xfce if i had to run a desktop environment, but i usually stick with dwm and haven’t got around to trying wayland yet
I used to only use KDE or KDE plasma with i3 but after using fedora I’ve fallen hard for Gnome and the design philosophy of the project.