There was a good thread on bboard (in the UNIX board) this week about favorite 
Desktop Environments on Unix-flavored machines, and I thought I'd cross-post 
and expand on my thoughts here.

My primary computer is currently running GNOME with some customizations. I know 
everyone likes to hate on GNOME, but I actually find it pretty good now. At least, 
up to date GNOME. I feel like a lot of the frustrations with GNOME on, say, Ubuntu 
is due to the outdated packages. I've migrated most of my Linux desktop usage to 
Fedora and find that I rarely have the errors and bugs that I constantly had on 
Ubuntu.

Besides, I'm trying out Silverblue (and really enjoying it honestly), and GNOME 
is kind of required for Silverblue. (I know Kinoite exists now, but I haven't 
had great experiences with KDE, so I thought I'd start with the normal Silverblue.)

I had kind of an interesting start with DEs- my first Linux distro was Ubuntu 
Natty Narwhal. Unity was new and raw and bleeding and terrible. (So almost 
everything has seemed great to me after living with Unity for years lmao.)

After a few years on vanilla Ubuntu, I migrated to Lubuntu due to the age of my 
laptop at the time. I ended up getting pretty involved with the Lubuntu 
distribution as a result. This was all pre-LxQt (which is abominable in my raw 
opinion). But because of my involvement with the distro I've always had a soft 
spot for LXDE and still use it on occasion.

Since then, I've bounced around a few things and eventually found the best fit 
for me with GNOME, or at least, GNOME with some personalization, and fresh and 
updated as possible as long as the hardware can handle it.

I do have one laptop that definitely can't handle it. It's currently on MATE 
but I don't know that I'm really a fan of MATE. I don't use that laptop for 
serious productivity (it's too small for most things - I mostly carry it because 
it's so small but can still fire up a nice shell to home when I'm travelling.)

I also have played with XFCE and may want to give it a shot for real at some 
point.

The thread on bboard did make me want to try some of the lighter-power 
desktop managers that were mentioned in the thread. I've seen cool demos of 
dwm, and I've known other people who swore by i3. I don't know much about 
fluxbox, which was mentioned by several people - so maybe I will also add 
that to my list to check out when I can.

But for now, I think I'm sticking with GNOME at least on this main computer 
while I give Silverblue a good spin.