Many of us use or have used kde plasma or gnome. I love kde 
this week I tried the new gnome, it is really awesome too!
However, I always have the dilemma between these two major DE. What if they stopped existing tomorrow, what other DE would you folks use instead?
Please no DE bashing, this is rather to discuss DE awesomeness and understand why you use what you use.
MATE, because I already use it. 
Probably Xfce or some of WM ( bspwm or i3 )
AwesomeWM or OpenBos or Lxqt.
Xfce or Lxqt, are you guys choosing these because it is gtk vs qt, or that doesn’t matter to you?
I.e. would the gnome user prefer gtk while plasma qt because of the apps etc…
For me, it doesn’t matter I like lighter DE/WMs.
I never looked abot gtk or qt. Because honestly I dont know difference xD .
Important for me , it needs to be light, good looking and customizable.
Same for me. I would use i3wm or qtile. These make me more productive via keyboard, and once the config file is set up, I can just copy to my other computers and have it as I like it. But sometimes I like to login back to a nice DE for a couple of hours.
My understanding is what toolkit and libraries are used to build the app. Like Qt creator for qt apps vs. whatever people use for gtk.
Sometimes it comes into play if you have a 4k screen and want to scale apps, qt and gtk may need to be configured separately which is the major pain to me.
It also come into play for example your file managers and windows look a bit different, like dolphin vs thunar/nemo. And perhaps for upgrades, gtk 2, gtk 3
I just stick with one until I just feel like switching or testing. I never change unless I get to play around with it in a VM. Even switching to Linux I played with Arch in a VM for a long time. Once I switch I stay with it changing it when necessary.
But now I’ve found virt-manager with KVM. Now I spend a lot of time on my virtual desktop than on my bare metal one. Anyway, I’m pretty much in love with Awesome might create my own rc.lua with less amount of line. The orginal seems to be a bit bloated.
I generally use Xfce when I have a desktop environment (DE), but I don’t always use a DE. My next most frequent graphical environment is the light, easy to modify IceWM, an old classic window manager that originally came from the twm → fvwm → IceWM branch (along with several other window managers).
I always come back to Xfce, because its nice and gtk.
Qt hurts my eyes.
Me too! Often I have a preference for gtk apps, that is mostly subjective? But I was a happy gnome user in the past. Kde made leaps in the design though, they make it look really nice nowadays.
dwm
First choice would be Budgie, I’m a GTK user after all. Second choice would be a WM like awesome/openbox/or bspwm, though I have no experience with those, so I’d have to experiment for quite a bit till it feels just right.
I am also considering a couple of wm, qtile because it is based on python and could learn something useful along the way. i3wm is easiest to get started, although qtile has nice widgets that work out of the box.
Do you use dwm because it uses C, or other reason?
It sucks less than any other WM.
And yes, I’m very comfortable with C, so that’s one of the reasons for dwm, too.
The two main reasons why I use KDE Plasma are: Konsole and Kate, two programs that I cannot imagine being without (in my opinion, the best terminal emulator ever, and a really good text editor). Of course, I can use Konsole and Kate on other WMs as well, but they have a lot of dependencies and if I’m going to install hundreds of KDE packages in order to use Konsole and Kate, I may as well use Plasma…
Besides, Plasma is the only DE which isn’t terrible.
Easy peasy - Cinnamon all the way.
Xmonad
+1, my preferred terminal and text editor besides vim.