Cinnamon. Stupidly simple and elegant looking.

For aesthetics: Budgie, with Cinnamon a close second For simplicity and speed: XFCE

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.

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.

I usually use WindowMaker or FVWM but as a desktop environment… CDE

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.