Plasma mostly… but i like Xfce, Cinnamon, Budgie, Mate & i3.
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Xfce+Picom, I don’t need more. People complain its development is slow, but on the other hand it makes it very stable.
I am using a custom DE, personal project using BSPWM, polybar, rofi and other usually used utilities.
It runs like a normal DE, with its own environment variables, config folder and custom script utilities (all based on bash).
I have currently named it “bsp-desktop”, but it might change when I will feel it could be announced (with a bang 
) 
.
I forgot it was a secret… 
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What do you mean slow, to me it seems more like it was discontinued. No sign of life from the devs anymore. 
Their team is small, that’s why the transition from gtk2 to gtk3 took so much time, but they’re still active.
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XFCE is notoriously slow to bump versions. It took 16 months to go from 4.14 to 4.16, and that particular update was in December 2020. So it’s been even longer now since the 4.16 update, but global pandemic etc yadda yadda…
Anyhoo, it’s definitely still actively developed, even if the updates still aren’t as fast as something like KDE/Plasma, which seems to release updates every month.
Both approaches have their respective benefits and downsides.
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I was listening to one of the leads of xfce on a podcast and it was like only 5 people that actually maintain it or something insane
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Even on Fedora Rawhide, I keep using Xfce-DE, wherever possible. Currently on my 2009 iMac (bare-metal). The 2011 MacBook Pro uses KDE. Both have Gnome43 installed, as the main DE for Fedora.
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Yeah, would sound about right for the number of regular developers IMO.
That said, there’s likely hundreds of contributors though. Same as with any other DE.
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The creator and former leader of the project is now a maintainer and, from what I’ve read, work for Redhat on Mutter. Could help if/when they migrate to Wayland.
currently i use lxqt and i3 nitrogen betterlockscreen… further no special 
personally, i LOVE pantheon 
i don’t mind being out of the mainstream/left field sometimes
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XFCE. With the dockbarx plugin to make it usable (w10 style taskbar).
Pretty simple setup if you ask me, but it works for me!
(i use intellihide taskbar too, shame it’s buggy)
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Nice, I play around with all these, plus Cinnamon:
IceWM - a living piece of history that still works!
Openbox - very flexible, modern
Enlightenment - funny look, but super efficient with system resources
Mate - Super reliable and universal (works nicely on BSD also, etc)
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No, you shouldn’t vote 9 times, you should kill gnome and install plasma instead
I have been doing some serious WM hopping and I always come back to i3 or BSPWM.
They are both great. i3 is easier to get started meanwhile BSPWM needs some thought and tinkering but once you done it is fantastic. Both are still super simple compared to fully hackable WM:s like Awesome and Qtile.
This is still kind of a rabbit whole… I already stopped distro hoping after EOS and Arch and now I am in the other hole with these window managers… 
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Have you tried spectrwm 
another rabbit hole 
config file is easy to modify and has sane keybindings.
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It looks interesting so I definately test it. This is way too easy compared to de hopping.
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I’m on Plasma right now, but xfce and gnome are some of my favorites, i want to start messing with WMs but havent got around to learn about them yet.
My cents… Just start with i3 and then move those others (if you even feel any need after you figure out i3)
i3 is stable as hell and it can do all most anything.
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