Linux

KDE.

Mostly like Windows 7, but I recently moved the dock to the top.

I just recently switched to using the COSMIC alpha, coming from KDE on my personal laptop and from GNOME on my work laptop. I absolutely love it. It's very stable and polished for still being in alpha.

I really like its tiling and workspaces. The navigation just feels very natural to me. I am a very big fan of keyboard only navigation.

Since both of my laptops have hybrid graphics, I am also a fan of COSMIC's approach to hybrid graphics, that it generally let's you quite easily specify if you want to run an app on dGPU or iGPU.

And last of all it just looks gorgeous.

I started out on Cinnamon (via Mint). Although I have used Ubuntu many moons ago but despised Gnome and never touched it since. After Mint In went to Arch where I DE hopped for many years. I tried XFCE (didn't like the visual inconsistences); Openbox - liked and loved for quite a while as a minimalist setup; Mate - too old looking so didn't last; Deepin - lasted a very long time because I loved it so much but eventually stopped because they changed the design too much to be link Windows; Budgie which lasted a little while and was the next closest to what Deep in provided. Was too immature at the time to be enjoyed long term; Pantheon - I still love Pantheon. It's consistent, polished and cohesive. To me a perfect blend of nice looking, minimal and functional. Stopped using because I got tired of having to fix it on Arch; Finally KDE. It's what I've been using for several years now because it just works, it looks nice, it's very customisable (I can make my desktop look similar to Pantheon), I like the integration and ecosystem of apps, it has great support and devs that listen.... I'm yet to have a DE tempt me away from it. Not even Cosmic lol.

old school here, started with X Terminal and motif (mwm) and played with twm of fvwm last century. I have always like Xfwm/Xfce because it is simple and it works. I have the start menu/quick launches, the button bar where windows appears, and the icon area, a little bit like windows 95. No icons on my desktop.

dwm is neat

Keep in mind that cosmic is still in an alpha build. It’s missing a lot of features and his buggy here are there. I’m sure it will be pretty awesome and once it releases it 1.0 version.

KDE and I keep it mostly stock. I usually get a compact desktop pager widget and add a kwin plugin to dynamically add/remove virtual desktops.

I use emptty and herbsluft.

I use Mate on my laptop; before that I used Cinnamon.

To be honest, DEs are basically terminal window managers for me. If I didn't need a graphical web browser for everything I do (because that's basically what software is these days - shit you log into from a web browser) I'd probably be using GNU Screen or possibly Twin to manage multiple shells instead.

If the drag-and-drop functionality of modern DEs wasn't so helpful I'd probably still be using twm because I like stuff that does what I need, and otherwise stays out of my way.

I like Cinnamon, stacked on the right (vertical bar) with the third party cinnamenu start menu. Simple, and it works.

I have been liking river lately after switching to it from hyprland. River is much more similar to my previous one which was xmonad.

Krunner on Meta And a lot of alt + tab

That's pretty much it 😅

Cinnamon. I feel like it's a nice middle ground between the minimalism of Gnome and the maximalism of KDE Plasma

Cinnamon is a long time favorite of mine; it has a certain practical mindedness that I like. Gnome irritates the absolute shit out of me and Cinnamon inherits just a little too much from Gnome. I'm using KDE on my main computer at the moment, which I still think is my second choice. Doesn't really help that my move to KDE also came with a move to Wayland, which killed a few tools I still miss.

DWM