Just to balance the narrative, I think Gnome is the best DE. It does the best job staying out of the way and letting me focus on my work. Most Linux users I know (maybe 20 or so SEs I work with) use Gnome (or maybe the slightly modified ones by Pop/Ubuntu). I don't really see this widespread antipathy you speak of.

It is actually pretty decent. Since GNOME ~40 the desktop is pretty much out of your way and a joy to use imho.

e.g. NixOS survey from last year. https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2022-nix-survey-results/18983 has Gnome as highest with 259, followed by Plasma at 201. Though, prob'ly NixOS survey population isn't a good representation of wider Linux users. (xmonad got 108 on the same poll).

Here's this poll from r/fedora from last year. https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/z5pt2z/what_is_your... which has Gnome at 2.4k to KDE's 963.

I like XFCE a lot. It's really great especially if you're one who uses the browser for a lot of stuff, and don't care about Wayland.

I install arch from scratch. Arc dark gtk theme. XFCE. I just delete the dock and make the menu the inbuilt whisker menu so it looks like the windows ui which I am comfy with. Add key bindings for win+numpad for window snapping, add super key binding for start menu. Looks nice, very very fast.

None of it's inbuilt apps tho. I use the browser to open basically every file. The Google docs extension handles office files. Pdf, images, are opened natively obviously. VLC for media.

> You'd probably get a more meaningful discussion if you had instead asked what desktop environment they use.

Possibly, but that’s not what GP wanted to know.

Guess I'm an exception then. Gnome 3 had a slow and dumpy start but it's improving more and more now to me

Did that almost a month ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37007315