XFCE. It’s simple, configurable, and most importantly, efficient. The only other desktop environment I ever liked enough to actually use is Cinnamon, but I can’t get that on Gentoo anymore (it got dropped from Portage due to a general lack of maintainership).

Plasma all the way! It is customizable, sleek, fast, and has a great community behind it. It also doesn't throw stones in your way when you try to do something that doesn't strictly adhere to the developers' ideology (GNOME does this).

If I may also recommend a distribution, openSUSE is still the definite edition of a KDE Plasma distribution :) There's the Argon and Krypton live CDs with the latest releases.

KDE Plasma, hands down, for its infinite configurability, low RAM consumption, and beautiful appearance with little effort (none, actually, it looks great out of the box even if copying the Windows paradigm way too much). Also, no stupid CSD titlebars. And the ability to "Add new [stuff]" to pretty much every aspect of the desktop is unparalleled on any other DE on any OS.

GNOME 3/40 takes the macOS approach of "you're to stupid to decide for yourself," then tries to make up for it with perhaps the hackiest extension ecosystem ever created (they're like bandaids, if bandaids performed life-threatening surgery every time you put them on; surgery all but guaranteed to kill you if you aren't the right age, blood type, and eye color). Deepin is gorgeous, but good luck if it's not exactly the way you want it already.

Cinnamon, Budgie, Pantheon, and every other Mutter-based/GNOME 3 fork DE are pretty much do the same, just with different desktop paradigms, because GNOME 3 made it such a hacky pain to extend.

Mate and XFCE are lightweight, performant, and fairly customizable, but both still have quite a few bugs and/or lots of ugly little paper cuts, especially with panels and widgets (and XFCE's Orage "calendar" widget is a crime against humanity).

I may not be as "leet" as the "haxors" using one of the trendy tiling managers (though there are about 27 different KWin scripts for tiling windows if I want that sort of thing in Plasma), and may not be consuming as little RAM as those using LXDE/LXQT, [WHATEVER]Box, etc, but at least my desktop doesn't require hacking a config file for simple settings changes and doesn't look reminiscent of Windows 98 or older.

With that said, if Mate ever got the old GNOME 2 (formerly the most configurable desktop, from which Mate was forked) style up to date with desktop computing in this decade AND squashed bugs which have persisted since GNOME 2 AND made it easy to select KWin as the window manager, I'd be on board. For all the ridicule it received, Ubuntu's (still GNOME 2 based) pre-Unity Netbook Edition is probably the best DE that ever existed (at the very least, its full-screen menu was the best of the sort that ever existed - please stop trying to imitate macOS's Launchpad, it's really not that good).

I use Xfce via installing Xubuntu. I shifted to it when Gnome 2 expired and have never felt any need to change again. I like having multiple workspaces (usually four) with a simple visual switcher to mouse click between them and each having a unique wallpaper. I add a small set of custom launchers in the toolbar for the applications I use 99% of the time. That's it, I simply don't need anything else.

In my pre-Ubuntu Mandrake period I mainly used KDE3, which is where I found the wallpaper-per-workspace idea suited me. But when I shifted to Ubuntu I found Gnome 2 good enough to not bother with the Kubuntu desktop.

It's always interesting to see people contra-claiming about how "light" Xfce is or isn't - mostly quoting memory usage as the vital measure. When I do occasionally try out alternatives: Gnome, Budgie, LxQt, Plasma/KDE I mainly find that they have a lot of lag in normal usage or simply lack a feature that I consider important. That's LxQt for lacking different wallpapers per workspace. With the others for being laggy too often : my hardware is never latest-thing, so maybe that's why.

Curiously, for a long time Ubuntu user, I was never much fussed about Unity. I simply understood that it wasn't aimed at me, and as a non-beginner I could/would/should just add a DE that I preferred. No angst involved, and no reason to dump a distro over the default DE of one install option.

Eventually, I stopped installing from the plain Ubuntu then adding Xubuntu, and just installed as Xubuntu instead.

I used GNOME for the last 3-4 years because it's the default desktop env. Recently, I dove into i3wm because I wanted my stuff always at the same place and have more customization.

I couldn't be more pleased by a desktop env than with i3wm. When I log in my browser, IDE, Slack and Spotify all open in their seperate workspace and I can retrieve them with Mod+ so I can finally ditch the ****** alt+tab. I also like how you can rearrange the windows of a workspace: you can put them stacked on top of each others, side by side dividing your spaces how you want, etc.

I use gnome. Actually, I haven't found my Linux yet, but currently gnome serves me well.Having a terminal already makes me very happy. I am just having problems with some updates, that I am having to reinstall several (apps) instead of just updating.I like a nice design, but I also don't give up high customization power. For now I am very satisfied.

LXDE. I switched to debian but I found out too late they don't have qtile in their official repositories, so I went with LXDE because I know they use openbox as the window manager. Now, qtile and openbox are very different but for my specific workflow that doesn't have a big impact.

I used xfce for years, it is solid and good workspace control. I took a short period with i3, workspaces take on a new meaning and core to its function. Today I am using Gnome, the new approach to task management is interesting.

I found i3 was very primative on its application launch. Not having a menu to launch applications is a problem for me, I don't always know everything. I also had to change out the default launcher so I could launch applications with names I knew. It just can't find apps as well as gnome-do.

I use i3wm bcz it's a window manager, and lightweight and customisable, and I can almost add shortcuts for everything, and it's a manual tailer, so I can choose where and how the next window be, finally it's configuration is completely understandable and simple

Probably this is the only window manager, that can add or remove keybindings on the move,
Ex:

modes

1. Normal mode have default keys
2. Resize mode will have the resize keys to increase or decrease the window sizes,
3. Gap mode will have gap keys to increase the gaps or decrease the gaps,

I have dual boot with KDE and GNOME because I like both of them and I’m not able to take a final decision. I’m waiting to try GNOME 40 and see if having the horizontal virtual desktops (like KDE) helps me to decide which one is for me.

I use XFCE, because it is simple and unobtrusive. I considered switching to Enlightenment or LXQT at some point, but never really got around to do so.

Lxqt ,Lubuntu..
Simple , fast , reliable...

Gnome with a few extensions. Its productive enough and doesn't require a lot of time investment. Most of my development flow is in the terminal anyways since I use tmux + neovim.

XFCE being light is an urban legend. It's fatter than Plasma and afaik even GNOME are.