Linux

Cosmic, just trying it out because i liked the extensions system76 made for gnome, and cosmic DE is more native experience of that.

XFCE + Compiz

The unholy combination of accelerated 3D graphics and performance, all without the stupid drawbacks of wayland.

Runs much lighter than KDE even with all the 3D cube and windows stuff enabled.

Extremely customizable as well. XFCE already does a great job of UI/UX, it just lacks a compositor to add flare (xfwm4 has no animations, only some blur effects).

Cinammon cuz I didn't knew it doesn't like kde plasma and now I am too lazy to change it fora bit of time.

I'm currently using Cinnamon because I thought it would be better than Xfce. While I do think that Cinnamon looks better, there were some minor things that I preferred with Xfce. I want to try Mate and maybe some of the other DEs if I can find a good distro that has them but I may go back to Xfce the next time I install Linux Mint.

I use KDE plasma 5 atm and i planning on an upgrade to 6 soon; but it's my daily driver so I've dragging my feet on it for a couple weeks now.

What happened when tried troubleshooting your problems?

I use herbstluftwm. The configuration is straightforward and it fits my minimal needs.

Nobody uses cinnamon? Honestly - I really like using cinnamon with Debian. I heard that they promised not to fuck with the UI for no reason unlike... everyone! @Mwa Cinnamon is a fairly nice, easy to use desktop - I don't really care which is better, but if they change it, you have to re-learn it. Top tip for UI design - don't think that your users want to re-learn how to interact with your UI - they might go outside, or elsewhere.

Xfce

I've daily driven every major DE except KDE (GNOME, Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon) and I always ended up switching back to xfce. I'm not a fan of GNOME's workflow and since it's not that customizable without extensions, that made me switch from it very quickly. I used Cinnamon on Mint for a few months and while the experience was mostly fine, it sometimes felt a bit laggy. As for MATE, while I love the GNOME 2 layout and it's a relatively lightweight DE, I encountered plenty of visual bugs there and I could very easily replicate that GNOME 2 layout on Xfce (without a system menu, but still).

Gnome and Cosmic. Gnome 'cause of simplicity and Cosmic because of Rust.

!I am a Rust programmer and I love this language!<

GNOME because it's the only good option that looks modern and has proper development. Excuses of KDE fanboys that GNOME team makes weird decisions are not accepted.