Cinnamon. Stupidly simple and elegant looking.
For aesthetics: Budgie, with Cinnamon a close second For simplicity and speed: XFCE
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.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.
Seems like I'm the outlier here that prefers Gnome over KDE. Gnome feels more polished than KDE for me. Granted KDE comes with more features out of the box, but I don't find anything lacking in Gnome for me.
Tried KDE long time ago to compare it to Gnome 3, went back to Gnome. Tried KDE again a few months ago to compare to Gnome 42, came back to Gnome again.
I also can't stand having all my programs' name starting with K.
I like Gnome the best too. In my experience, it's the desktop environment that focuses the most on making sure that no little bugs slip in. Like normally when you're using a desktop environment, it will be good except for a few bugs here and there where you have to remember weird things like not backing out of the settings menu in a certain way in order to not trigger a bug. Gnome seems to have the least amount of weird little bugs like that.
It's not very configurable out of the box, but I prefer that too. I'm getting a bit old and set in my ways, and don't really want to mess around with too much configuration anymore.
I also can't stand having all my programs' name starting with K.
Like Okular, Spectacle, Dolphin, .....
Maybe I shouldn't have said all, but it's annoying to me when the they put a "k" in the name in a very awkward way just because it's an KDE app.
Gnome with pop_os tiling window manager
KDE
Default GNOME (Wayland), it just works
GNOME, for sure. It works out of the box, and it's kind of pretty out of the box.
I also tried it on a touch screen PX and it works surprisingly well.
XFCE, while it doesn't have all the fancy animations and such it is incredibly customizable while still being super light weight.
Xfce, didn't try KDE yet, using gnome currently.
xfce for a very long time. I really like tiling WMs but always come back to xfce
It's between XFCE for it's simplicity and KDE for it's Wayland support for me
I usually use WindowMaker or FVWM but as a desktop environment... CDE
Xfce, i just like it.
