I recently spent a significant amount of time searching for a Debian DE that I could stomach replacing Windows 10 as a daily driver, and GNOME was the only really comparable choice. Anything else feels straight out of 2002. There are better choices for resource constrained devices, but for a modern linux desktop it's the only real choice IMO.
GNOME and KDE.<p>I used to use other stuff, but GNOME and KDE are "good enough" and I can make most of it disappear with extensions. I've tried tiling window managers (XMonad, Awesome, i3) and a few other DEs, and honestly, I find myself fiddling with them a lot, which isn't very productive. I use KDE on openSUSE because it's the default and works reasonably well and GNOME on Arch because it has worked reasonably well out of the box.<p>So yeah, I'm tired of fiddling with stuff and I trust both major DEs to properly implement Wayland and other tech without impacting my user experience much.
GNOME if using a touchscreen-enabled device, LXDE (mind you, not LxQt) / Xfce otherwise. It would be nice to have a lightweight but genuinely full-featured environment under Wayland - maybe someone should pick up <a href="https://github.com/raspberrypi/maynard" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/raspberrypi/maynard</a> ?
Cinnamon (on Mint).<p>The defaults are, by far, the closest to my needs.<p>Also, more importantly, I've been using the "traditional" desktop for 2 decades and I just can't change my way - the taskbar+menu is my crutch.<p>On lower end machines, it's xfce.
The existence of this survey is evidence that Linux on the desktop is flawed. There should be one answer. Instead, Linux desktop users are using Linux on the desktop because they can’t be satisfied by Windows or OSX. So then they try Linux on the desktop, and aren’t satisfied with GNOME, so they then need to fork and create another desktop manager. This new desktop manager doesn’t suit someone, so instead of working to improve it, they work on another desktop manager. Linux on the desktop is a sign of someone who doesn’t recognize that a solution is good enough and accept it. It’s a pathology and says more about the people who are using it than the actual technology.