I think this may be a debate. Personally I’m staying with GNOME and SwayWM. What do you think is the best DE or WM?
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Sway. Everything else is bloat and worse, imo. 
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I used Gnome 2, Unity on Ubuntu, Gnome 3, KDE 5, KDE 6 and XFCE (last year). For WM I don’t have too much experience with other, than a little bit i3 and mostly Qtile, and now KDE with a tiling window manager plugin called Polonium, which turns KDE/Kwin into a limited auto tiler.
For a window manager, I would say Qtile . But at the moment I don’t use it anymore and switched to KDE Plasma. And yes, KDE Plasma is the best DE. 
And the question which of the DEs and WMs are the best is definitely debatable. People debate about this since decades.
true. top2 is probably hyprland
After using gnome and gnome-based DEs for 7-8 years, I can tell you that KDE plasma is fantastic.
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thats prob my top 2 in DE’s
At the moment GNOME46 rules them all. Then it will be GNOME47 and so on. 
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yes, KDE feels too “Windows-y” so GNOME is the best DE, but Sway is definitely my overall winner still, even though its a tiling wm
dwm
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There is no such thing.
The best for you, is the one that makes you more productive.
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gnome feels to macos~y which is arguably about 10x worse. GTK is also a hot steaming pile of garbage, I often suspect the gnome devs have no idea wtf they’re doing.
Qt is great, and plasma/kde is ok, and if u think it feels to windows~y u can just change how it feels. But honestly, imo plasma is both too bloated and crash happy.
I’ve been using hyprland which doesn’t even have a stable release yet, like i’ve even used git versions of it, and over 4 months it has crashed less for me than plasma did in the one month before that. The kde devs just have some aversion to fixing bugs it seems. They prioritize new features over stabilizing the old ones, even if they are system critical ones. And kwinft wasn’t enough to fix it.
if you want a ready to use good to go out of the box experience on linux, i would still say plasma over gnome (cuz gnome sucks ass even if kde probably crashes more), but i’d probably still recommend xfce over both of them (and that’s more windowsy than kde lol)
but if you don’t mind doing a little bit (this means lots and lots and lots) of tinkering to get the perfect experience, you pick a solid base like openbox or awesome or sway or indeed dwm, and then you puzzle it into the exact experience you want over a couple of months, or years. at the end of it it will look like you want, feel like you want, and not be crash happy as you will have taken the best of all worlds and turned it into your very own custom environment that’s perfect just for you.
I’m asking people what de/wm makes them be more productive
I did exactly that. I made sway look as well I could, and here I am.
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Please consider editing the title and the op to reflect what you are truly asking.
We have had many of these what DE/WM is best topics already.
Some unfortunately have derailed to DE bashing and flame war.
I am sure this is not your intention.
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yes, ill do it to not cause another “non-sudo package managers” scenario
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The DE/WM barely factors into my productiveness at all, do they all have virtual desktops? Yes.
That’s it. That’s all i need to maximize my productivity.
TTiling or floating? Honestly works about the same for me, i don’t even have a preference between them. I think tiling looks good, but i think floating means fewer problems since a lot of applications don’t like being forced into certain sizes or aspect ratios. But it’s generally not that hard to solve on the tiling wm i’ve used (which is admittedly only hyprland) since it supports floating windows so i can just enable float for the problematic ones and be done with it.
Rofi or some other application launcher like the plasma or even the gnome one? makes no difference.
Waybar is sexy af, i can display so many cool things on it, but if i’m on X and can’t use it, i still have conky which can do all the same things more or less.
And the rest of productivity is just the applications, and u can use any application in any environment
its all up to one’s preference, like people having wallpapers with the most illegal images on them and some actually make it so they are productive. That is why I, and many others, use linux.
I’m comfy enough choosing KDE, especially now that Plasma 6 is out and fixed a bunch of long-standing Wayland-related bugs. If I want something weird, KDE is like “sure”, but if I don’t it gives me a nice default configuration.
For tiled WMs, Hyprland looks like something I’d get along with, but I need to sit and configure it in a virtual machine before considering it full-time.
If you’re switching from windows, I would also recommend going for KDE (Plasma 6) or XFCE (really basic and classic DE, Windows XP style). But KDE might be the better choice.
On laptops Gnome has some nice properties, too. It has excellent gesture support in my opinion. But the better overall package at the moment seems to be KDE.
Well that’s my opionion, others may have different ones.
I want a DE that is stable, simple, customizable and not be bloated with features i don’t want or use.
So i use XFCE which is for me the best choice but that does not mean it is the best choice for everyone
Plasma is also a fine choice but i don’t like been bloated, crashes, glitches and looks like Windows.
I do like some Plasma apps been more sophisticated then XFCE apps like kate, kcolor, dolphin.
But for me i choose simplicity over more sophisticated and if i do want that i can install it.