I used many of the traditional DEs, but the Budgie is the one I am most comfortable with. I find it easy to set it up to my likings. Unlike Plasma for example, Budgie does not overwhelm me with this sheer amount of customization options and other preferences. I cannot get the hang of KDE Plasma really.
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Young enough to learn them…old enough to forget! 
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Still on Plasma. What I hate about it is it takes a long time to make it look the way you want. Unless you use Latte Dock and the layout switcher.
GNOME looks pretty, but… Plasma is prettier and better.
The real problem is - the more recently I learned it - the faster it goes away! Left-Amiga Shift-K to define a column for cut/copy/paste is still there 
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I’ve just spent a few hours playing with XFCE… I forgot how painfully snappy and fast it was, more so for the barebones functionality that doesn’t overthink things. A part of me is debating jumping back to it for a while to see if I really have been over-complicating workflows with Plasma simply because you can. Is too much choice a bad thing…? That’s a can of worms I’m not going to open for now as a discussion 
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Full stop GNOME here. I think this is DE which you can love or hate. I love GNOME. I like whole design, workflow, top bar, workspaces, Nautilus, GSConnect (to sync my phone’s notifications, files, photos). It’s very clean and I love this aesthetic design. I know that it’s not as much customisable as other DE’s but this is not the idea behind it. It’s simple, good looking, just works. I found that GNOME makes me ultra-productive because there are no “too much GUI options” (for me KDE has to much settings) and I don’t spend hours to tweaking it in 723764724 different ways as I did in other DE’s 
In the end of the day, as we all know it, this is totally personal preference and it’s amazing that here in Linux we have many different ways so we can choose one which works for us the best way. 
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Note: This is not any kind of evangelism because I do not mean to say that everyone should use GNOME or something like that. I just wanna share my personal thoughts here.
I will add few words to my previous post above. I use vanilla GNOME, I mean no dash-to-dock, no dash-to-panel, no any other kind of dock, no menu. I use only 2 extensions:
- Lock Keys - to have simple OSD pop-up and indication when caps-lock is pressed
- GSConnect - as I wrote above to syncing my phone, it’s very well integrated into menu BTW
There is interesting story and some kind of my personal evolution behind it. When I started my Linux journey my very first distro was Ubuntu (as for many I suppose). In Ubuntu there is GNOME with side panel (like dash-to-dock) and I was used to it. Later I switched to Fedora and there was vanilla GNOME. I was shocked and I had no idea how to use it. It felt strange for me. So the very first thing I always did, in every distro with vanilla GNOME (I was hopping a lot), was adding dash-to-dock extensions and setting it up to look and behave exactly as in Ubuntu…
But, after some readings and upon reflection I thought: Let’s try to use it in vanilla way, as GNOME developers wants me to do it by default. It wasn’t easy at first but then I realise how to use it properly. The main idea is to not waste space on the screen and the second one is that SUPER key is the main button here. The third one is propably that we need to use keyboard shortcuts here little more than in “Windows-like” DE’s.
After logging in I get aesthetic wallpaper without any icons and top bar with basic informations but there’s “not too much” there. Here is what I’m doing. I’m pressing SUPER key and start typing first letters of the app I want to open (or I’m launching by keyboard shortcut which I set before). I’m not using mouse at this moment at all. When I see my app below search-box (when you press SUPER it’s not only Activities overview but it defaults to search box on the same screen so you can immediately start typing) just pressing enter and app is open. Okay. Now I want to divide my screen per two to write on the forum and monitoring conversation in messaging app or e-mail client, whatever, at the same time. SUPER key + arrows. UP: window goes full screen DOWN: windows revert to default size LEFT: it goes to the left side of the screen, filling all the space and it divides screen for 2 sides. I can do it same via SUPER+RIGHT arrow with another screen and here it is. OK. Now I want to leave it for a while bacause I need another thing. Workspaces. Starting with no windows open and I can do there other tasks. I can make more workspaces if I need (or it will be done automatically with dynamic workspaces). If I want to make quick look to all open windows I’m just pressing SUPER key and after months of using it becames very intuitive and natural.
Here I will stop writing my story because it’s getting little too long and turn more into some kind of tutorial but there are tons very useful keyboard shortcuts which I only learned after reading GNOME help pages and online manuals. I agree that it was not intuitive at first but it doesn’t mean that something it’s wrong with it.
For me, personally, it is exactly same situation as story about DVORAK keyboard. It’s confirmed that DVORAK is faster and more ergonomic to write on than QWERTY but at the time of research about it there was already too many typewriters to make it profitable to change that trend and next computers just adopted it.
We’re using computers for years so we’re very used to classic desktop interface. That’s why we call it “intuitive”. But I always wonder: if I gave a non-standard interface or a DVORAK keyboard to a small child who is just getting to know the world… Everything would be different. They are all just deeply ingrained habits. I changed it. I changed my mind to use GNOME and GNOME has completely changed the way I’m interacting with my computers. And that’s why I love it! 
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For me it is a similar experience with i3wm, its a whole different world…
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I’m sticking with Plasma for the most part.
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Same here.
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I find plasma is very fast uses little more ram than others. It’s very fluid and responsive with desktop effects wobbly windows and magic lamp. It’s very customizable but you have to be careful with some settings such as icons, and themes. I don’t add anything other than packages that i know work. Experimenting with stuff can create problems and i see it here a lot. I do not get any lag, freezing or anything. My only wish is that dolphin could be more like nemo on Cinnamon so i could have root access with Dolphin like nemo that was built in. Not some other hack to get it which i don’t like.
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I’m a DE Hopper… So far I’ve been on Plasma for 2 weeks, usually I hop between Gnome and Plasma
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I used to do that too and before i was a distro hopper. Now I’m a boot hopper! I just boot into the desktop i want with rEFInd triple boot on EOS! 
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Very good post! 
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You make some really valid points, - I think Gnome works amazingly well, if you stick to using it the way the Developers want it to be used. Which is fine, - it’s a toolset designed without flexibility intentionally. Some DEs are designed to be tweaked, others left well alone. I’ve struggled with Gnome because it doesn’t do what I want it to do, in the way I want it to be done, and that’s my issue not Gnome’s…
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Well, that’s the problem! The Linux users are not ready to use “the way the Developers want it to be used.” We are sort of anti-soviet…
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This is a highly underrated feature. It’s like a virtual stress ball.
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Linux users never be ready! that the beauty of it … you take out what no need + add what need . it like a suit one size,style no fit all 
so you mix &match and create your own … that my opinion 
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And that’s why our experience with things are so wobbly, but I’m as guilty as the next guy. You want it your way (and not just at Burger King) lol
I keep trying new things (like River referenced above) and trying to find what is closest to what I want it to be. Maybe one day 
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No wobble ever
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