For me its KDE.
Vanilla Gnome. It’s simple/boring, and I like that. It seems like most people that like Gnome don’t care that it’s not a poweruser DE, and aren’t excited to talk about it either.
I use gnome, but it’s basically the worst DE, except all of the other ones that have been tried
It has the least features, so by default the least bugs.
KDE is love, KDE is life
KDE sets a really high bar with all the packages and extensibility. Almost everything (not including the lesser known and used packages) is feature-packed and
just works
. I really don’t know any other software that constantly amazes me like KDE.Came to say KDE/Plasma. Glad it was already on top
KDE Plasma 5.27 is incredible. Such a stable and customizable experience! 😍
In addition to that, they make nice FOSS apps that are great for any DE (see Krita, Kdenlive)
Also it looks like Windows, and that to me is a huge plus for anyone using my computer.
Absolutely KDE Plasma.
Gnome with pop_os tiling window manager
KDE Plasma on desktop
Cinnamon on (older lower spec) laptop
i3. I mean, it’s fast, customizable, and you can make it look good. That’s all i need.
GNOME, with a little bit of extension customisability!
For aesthetics: Budgie, with Cinnamon a close second For simplicity and speed: XFCE
xfce for a very long time. I really like tiling WMs but always come back to xfce
Xfce is the best!
See I don’t really get the appeal of xfce, I kinda see it as the minimal DE you use if you’ve got low powered hardware or if you need a DE on a system that isn’t a personal computer and just need the bare minimum to run a graphical application or two
it’s the quickest fully featured de, and as an added bonus, it’s the least buggy of them all, it’s also very simple in it’s functioning, fairly close to a diy desktop + wm config, so tweaking random stuff like the compositor is easy to do and doesn’t break everything
Cinnamon. Stupidly simple and elegant looking.
Cinnamon is the best
I avoided GNOME3 for the longest time, but I decided to try it on a new install of Debian on a whim and actually ended up really liking it. Needed to enable a couple of extensions, but once you get used to it the workflow isn’t at all that bad.
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.