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.

DE: none

WM: Sway on my orange pi 5 max and hyprland on my x86_64 PC.

GNOME. I love the workspace management and simplicity

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)

I’m running a headless server with no WM or DE. It’s all CLI just like boomers did it with multics and unix. No pretty pictures, no wasted cycles on rendering nonsense. Just pure, unadulterated computation.

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.

I use KDE. I like how easy it is to customize pretty much everything. Like, if I want everything to be green, I can make everything green and no one can stop me.

KDE Plasma. It’s clean, fast, and just works.

KDE Plasma because I’m basic and I wanna get stuff done 👍

KDE. I don’t even do much to customize it. I think it looks pretty good out of the box.

KDE Plasma, as it’s most Windows-like and it has lots of cool widgets to add to your desktop Windows 7-style.

I’ve also tried Gnome, but I found it confusing and honestly a bit annoying. Not being able to properly minimise like I’m used to just really throws me off. I do think the visual style is well-designed, though.

I’ve tried Cinnamon as well. I thought it looked a bit too cheap for my taste, at least by default on Mint.

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)

Niri + Noctalia shell. I find the scrolling tiles to be excellent for my workflow, and the desktop shell feels nice and polished. Plus, Niri supports the Wayland zwlr_layer_shell, which means I can finally use Wallpaper Engine; there’s even a Noctalia plugin for it.

Niri has been great for gaming and streaming, so be sure to check it out if you haven’t.

I would be hesitant to use anything but KWin with Plasma. They were designed together as a set (like Mutter and Gnome), and I suspect replacing the WM would be no small task.

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.