My favs:
- (probably) Cosmic
- GNOME
- Plasma
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My favs:
For VMs I use IceWM. I like MATE (Gnome 2.0 feel) for daily driving.
I started with Zorin, then GNOME via Pop!OS, then KDE, vanilla GNOME, then KDE again.
Who knows cos they all have good features.
I prefer Plasma, but having an nvidia GPU makes using wayland a non-starter.
XFCE is my second favorite.
AwesomeWM is my current daily driver but outside the scope of the question
I use gnome as a primary, it feels really polished and doesn’t break or crash. Very modern, but if you want to have a super-customized experience, you’re gonna have a bad time. Extensions break every update and so do themes, so you either wait for the dev to port it or so it yourself. Annoying, so I only use vanilla for now.
Maybe I’ll try plasma, looks cool.
Started with XFCE but migrated away due to bugginess with my outdated system. Next was KDE. I was pleasantly surprised by how lightweight it ended up being after hearing otherwise. Now I'm on Sway, and it makes this old computer scream!
GNOME 2. I tried 3 for a year or two and the task bar crashes or lack the very basic feature of swapping window position. It's an external plugin so I don't expect it to be fixed in any year soon. Then I realize GNOME 2 was perfect before they ruined it in 3 so now I've been on MATE desktop for 4 years now. I think the new team is too small to catch up on any modern changes (webp support is lacking, and no wayland) and nothing I could do can fix that (minor development work on build system, donation) but I'd still accept a perfect 2010 era desktop over 2023 desktop that doesn't feel right after a decade of development.
Generally Plasma. I really like the look of Libadwaita applications, but the GNOME desktop is very much a "do it our way, or take a hike" - and some of the interactions that I've seen in the past between the GNOME group and others... well, lets just say whenever I see drama in the Linux community as of recently its always been either with GNOME or Wayland. That doesn't necessarily instill a lot of confidence in me using either of those.
Gnome, sometimes XFCE on older hardware.
Blorp
Cinnamon at the moment because I'm running LMDE 6. After that it would be gnome however it does have a higher RAM usage. I find Gnome based DE's easier to read and understand.
Whereas KDE just confuses me with its illegible font, awful icons (especially in Libre Office) and the nonsensical horizontal blue lines in some settings.