What's your favorite DE, and what does your workflow look like?
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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. -
I like Cinnamon, stacked on the right (vertical bar) with the third party cinnamenu start menu. Simple, and it works.
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I love the customisability of KDE
I read this often but found KDE so difficult to customise. XFCE or Cinnamon is what I'd consider extremely customisable, KDE doesn't even consistently listen to what theme colour I set
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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.
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Cinnamon. I feel like it's a nice middle ground between the minimalism of Gnome and the maximalism of KDE Plasma
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I am not using DE i am using hyprland
With arch Linux btw -
I keep forgetting tiling managers arent des
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After many years of tiling wms I recently settled on Plasma. I found that tiling causes more issues than it solves (window rules much?!). For me tiling only is useful for terminals but there are other solutions for that (tmux for example).
I had to get used to not being able to do workspace per monitor anymore but now I am using Activities which works really well actually. I am a dev and have a 3 monitor setup, one for logging (bunch of terminals), one for coding and one for the output of the project I am working on (browser).
I also play games for which Plasma is perfect, its xwayland implementation is flawless, even on HiDPI which cannot be said of Hyprland for example.
Tl;dr I like Plasma.
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Never used hyprland but Sway you can use the mouse to move stuff around, resize windows, etc. just hold down you mod key, usually super/windows key. If you have a bar setup correctly you can even click between workspaces or have a task list like on windows that you can click on. Alt Tab needs some re-imagining as its now three dimensional, but that's easy to tweak to how you want it with something like swayr. You can even add a start button equivalent if you wish.
I use Sway on Tumbleweed, before that Sway on Ubuntu. I have six main workspaces defined, odd numbered workspaces on my left monitor and evens on my right monitor. Both monitors are 32"@4k so a ton of real estate, I can easy fit in four large tiles per monitor, eight is a stretch but if you use the option to make windows full screen then you can run stuff in the background and then flip between things that are running in the background.
I use the layman add on to predefined layouts for my different workspaces, then bind apps on start up using my config to a particular workspace. I can still move them around, but automating as much as possible with a tiling windows manager is the secret IMO. Having everything just work and appear where I want with zero faffing around speeds up my workflow enormously. On Windows I use power-toys to provide a noddy version of tiling, but everything has to be done manually and its a complete PITA over a work day where I am opening and closing stuff.
As an example, I have my third workspace as my main coding workspace. Its divided into 3/4 and 1/4. The larger part I lock VS Code to it, the smaller part is usually a Firefox tab for reviewing documentation. My second workspace is my social workspace, that's divided into four long quarters, one for music, one for discord, one for signal, one for mail. All of this, including binding the apps to the workspace, are fully automatic.
I use the keyboard for most things. I use QMK based keyboards (configured using Vial), so I can bind multi modifier shortcuts to just two keys either on a separate layer or a chord. Reducing the number of keys you press really helps the ergonomics of activating them, especially if you move them to the home row and away from the pink hell hole that is where the modifiers are on most standard keyboards.
I think the biggest problem is that it requires work to get the right add ons and make it work the way you want to work, but get it right and the WM becomes transparent to how you work.
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Not often I meet another herbsluft user in the wild! waves
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Cinnamon, Feels like Gnome done right,it's stable,customizable,Sadly no HDR and a bit messy underneath the hood but I can use gamescope for HDR.
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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.
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Desktop environment? What desktop environment?
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GNOME on my laptop, using the trackpad. Three-finger swipe up to switch tasks/search. Two-finger tap for context menus. Three-finger tap for things like opening in a new tab, or closing a tab. Simple, intuitive, efficient, comfortable.
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I think softwares like i3 or dwm are what OP means.
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But dare you something doesn't work as expected under plasma. Trying to figure out what causes the issue is a daunting task. Also you mentioned windows rules much, did you mean you prefer windows rules from plasma to tiling? Because setting up windows rules for all your applications is AT LEAST as bothersome as it is in any of the twms I tried/use (i3wm, river) or WMs like labwc.
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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.
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I use Xfce with a swap of the window manager by Bspwm.
I got the easy to configure Xfce status bar (instead of things like polybar and others...) and also the Xfce terminal, file manager...
The window title is written to the status bar. I use Super + B/N to switch the workspaces. Some apps are set to floating mode like the image viewer, the calculator... So everything can be displayed in a good tiling WM and I don't need to manipulate windows. -
You guys have a monitor?
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Laptop yes. But no desktop environment, just a window manager, Sway.
