What DE/WM do you use? Any you tried in the past and hated?

I'm a big fan of tiling WMs. Even though in the past I did try GNOME/KDE, I never really sticked because I wanted a more bare-bones experience to learn how to configure the system via command line.

At first, I tried i3, then switched to dwm as using a real programming language for configuration felt more liberating. Unfortunately, it also didn't work out because I quickly stumbled upon patches incompatibilities and it was a nightmare to debug.

As a result, here I am, running AwesomeWM. Getting used to millions of keybindings was painful, but it was certainly worth it because nobody can use my computer now to me it's really convenient to do everything with a keyboard.

I've only tried a few of them.

For mint, I went with XFCE and Cinnamon.

For the lightweight Linux distros, I just went with whatever was bundled with them. None of them stood out, which is probably by design.

Tried KDE as well, and its customization options just blew me away. I always use it now for desktop installations.

Gnome, of course, on anything with a trackpad. I hate trackpads with a passion so I look for DEs that would make using them less painful.

Are we including WMs? I've only tried I3WM, Qtile, and (iirc) awesome, I'm awful with WMs so I can't really stay with them for long. My productivity takes a dive lol.

I'm a KDE guy through and through now. GNOME has a better workflow in my opinion, but the stronghanding isn't something I'm a fan of. KDE doesn't try to fight me as much and has taken some cues from GNOME (e.g. the window viewer being hot-cornered to the h

I've tried Cinnamon, and it's a good starting point for Windows users but the plugin store needs more love from them. MATE + Compiz is a good combo but Compiz is very much on its way out, I'm hoping MATE has a good compositor when they move to Wayland (or they use Wayfire). I'll use XFCE if I need something more lightweight.

DE? My typewriter can't print GUIs and if it coud it's just bloat. /s
I don't really need DEs. A WM and at most a taskbar is all I need. But I use xfce on my main machine because I installed it when setting up the os and it doesn't annoy me with features I don't want, so I never bothered switching to something else.

I bounce between XFCE and Neon. XFCE is preferred due to the very light weight and “stay out of my way” approach. I love simple. I also keep Neon installed because I like to see where the boundaries are pushed, and I did grow up in the golden age of CompViz / 3D cubes, etc. so I can enjoy chrome and rice when I see it 😂

my arch computer has DWM, and on this one i'm running bone-stock cinammon

Ok, I will actually start this time.

I been basically just using Cinnamon for the past 8 years. Since I used it for so long it is super familiar with it, I know where to find anything I possibly need and I can set it up the way I like in about 2 minutes. So it is just very comfortable for me to use it. And why change it if it works right?

Other than that the only thing I really tried (as in I used for more than a few days) was KDE and I hated it which was very disappointing to me because I heard so many people liking it. I had a really hard and confusing time trying to set it up the exact way I wanted and got hit with a nasty bug when the search would just stop working day 2 or 3 of using it. Maybe I just hit a very bad timing when I did but I have no interest trying it again.

KDE for years now. Shit just works and you can customize crap out of it. I used Awesome previously, but I am too old for tha stuff now. Life is too short.

I have never found a reason to leave i3. It is good and does what I need. I tried bspwm for a hot minute and there was aspects I liked, but I felt the documentation was lacking. DWM is annoying to patch. I might try out Hyprland when I feel wayland is ready but still there are features that are missing and some will never be present. I am a big fan of X11 Forwarding and am mad people think it is not worth continuing.

I use KDE. The workflow I've kept almost completely vanilla aside from shortcuts and the always on top button. The rest is minor theming, like changing is the accent color. I started a custom icon theme that I may come back to, but it's nothing much (all I've really changed is the minecraft launcher to be a bee 🤣).

I use KDE just cause everything just works, and there's always been an easy setting for me to simply toggle. And despite all the settings I feel I've been able to find what I need just fine.

There was one point in time that I did try customizing the workflow of Plasma. It was pretty fun coming up with some crazy ones but in the end it didn't really jive with me. If I do come back to changing the workflow I think I'd like to make a couple global themes to switch between a Plasma/MacOS/Unity layout. It's fun to switch it up sometimes ✨