I like best Gnome with modifications, not vanilla. A permanent dock as per “Dash2Dock Animated”, and the “Hide Top Bar” extension, so when an app gets maximized, both the top bar and the dock get out of the way. Also, disabling tap-and-drag via dconf (I really don’t understand why this is enabled by default on most Linux DEs, it’s extremely bad for usability), and enabling the min/max/close buttons via Gnome Tweaks. Other tweaks I like is the Bibata Modern Ice mouse cursor, and the Faenza icon theme. The rest are ok by default for the most part. It’s better than MacOS for me.

Second best gotta be Cinnamon, using the Cinnamenu menu extension, not the default menu. Overall, they’ve thought of almost everything building this DE and its settings. For those who want the best “Windows” could ever be, Cinnamon it is.

Third is XFce. It’s overall good, but it has some things that trigger me: no user admin app, no ability to turn off tap-and-drag (it just doesn’t turn off no matter what you try), and on Debian at least, the machine doesn’t go to sleep without asking for password (requires a policy-kit manual change). Its biggest advantage is that it’s lightweight and I use it as lot for old machines.

I find the rest under-par. I don’t like KDE, and I have thought long and hard why I don’t. It’s not how KDE is structured or works. KDE in fact is fine as a DE! Very powerful. It’s the Qt toolkit that bothers me. When an app loads, it kind of loads in chunks. It doesn’t blast everything rendered in the screen to feel smooth and modern, it kind of renders it as it reads it. And this just bothers me in a UI more than anything. Another thing I dislike is the long right-click menu on the desktop (same for Cinnamon btw).

MATE is nice but it’s just buggy. You setup your panels one way, you logout, you login back again, and the items have changed position. Fully reproducible for me under many different distros. Very, very annoying.

LXDE/LXQT, Budgie, etc, are not as developed as I liked them to be.

Gnome.

• The workflow is amazing once it “clicks” (but in the few days it takes before that happens, man it’s annoying. You end up asking yourself time and again why don’t they just copy Windows like everybody else)

• With the exception of ElementaryOS, Gnome seems to be the only DE that really cares about design, especially in terms of consistency. Random bits of text in different sizes, different fonts in different places, inconsistent padding, improper handling of rounded corners, etc all really bug me. Most people don’t seem to notice or care (probably because MS has trained us not to care about UX consistency lol), but for me it wears me out and makes me hate using PCs. Gnome is a polished UX and it feels like everything was designed very purposely, with a lot of thought.

• There’s a good ecosystem of GTK4/Libadwaita apps.

• Probably have the best accessibility features.

• It’s really stable for being a modern DE.

• I respect the devs for having a vision and sticking to it, despite getting hate/death threats for it. It’s led to a different and very functional DE, unshackled from the traditional Win95 UX paradigm.

E: just because it’s not your DE of choice doesn’t mean you need to downvote me or send me DMs calling me names lmao. Some people in the Linux community are completely unhinged lol

Vanilla GNOME because simplicity, very modern look and stability. Cinnamon is nice too but it’s just not for me. Its workflow is slower in my use cases

KDE. Looks great OOTB. Looks better if you spend an hour or two setting it up on day 1.

KDE Plasma.

I prefer KDE a lot, because:

• the UI is simple, material-ish and beautiful
• it doesnt sacrifice usability or waste screen space like GNOMEs minimalism. I especially like the buttons etc. of Qt apps, where GIMP is already struggling with the huge hugeness of GTK3.
• it runs 100% on Wayland
• it runs GNOME apps without modifying them a bit. There is an issue where Fedora doesnt want to use Adwaita icons, but a short autostart entry solves that. KDE Breeze dark/light can sync to adwaita dark/light
• KDE has tons of legacy support features, have a look at my experiment where I explored many of them
• it is modular and can be pretty minimal (I would like a more barebones version, without all the floating stuff etc)
• all the settings are in the same app! This is a huge issue with all the small ones, where nontechnical users need to know the difference between “GTK settings” “lightDM settings”, etc.
• Systemsettings are searchable, all settings pages are accessible from the global search, some pages are even shown when you use an alternative word, you can always search in english and your local language
• it is very actively developed
• it has tons of unique features.
• it has the biggest most complex apps situated in a DE on Linux. Period. KDEnlive, digiKam, Krita, Kate, Dolphin, …