I ran GNOME 2 and then moved to Cinnamon immediately upon the release of GNOME 3. I really liked these two DEs, but after trying Solus/Budgie, +/- 2.5 years ago, I was hooked.
I’m now a Budgie guy. I like the defaults, so I’m not tempted to wizzzz away my afternoons tinkering with endless customizations. It’s relatively light weight and so on Solus and Manjaro it feels very snappy … not so much on Ubuntu, though, where it feels a tad sluggish. I’ve been running Solus/Budgie on my primary machine(s), but I’ve been keeping a Manjaro/Budgie system up to date, in case I need something from the AUR, which honestly, isn’t very often.
If I need something that is particularly light, I usually reach for Mate (to get my GNOME 2 fix), or LXQt, which is really starting to show promise.
There are also people who like the Mac OS look and feel allot.
For those on Linux there is the Pantheon Desktop.
But that particular DE only really works well in Elementary OS, which is Ubuntu LTS based.
Which in my opinion is not the best distro ever.
i like deepin for this they get that feel and smooth running experience down they call it “fashion mode” and “efficient mode” for the windos look and feel
I continued using gnome for a while until I wanted something similar to windows in the taskbar, app menu, and date and time. I found budgie to have the layout and design I wanted. The only problem was it didn’t have window tiling.
After being unable to find a window tiling application, I decided to try XFCE and KDE. The design wasn’t too bad, but I couldn’t figure out how to customise the colors and have the menus scale up for high resolution displays.
When I returned to Gnome, a new shell extension appeared called dash to panel. This magical extension made the default gnome task bar like windows, and had some neat customisation options.
The author of the plugin also has a github with links to other extensions that make the task bar even more like windows.
I like Gnome because of the shell extensions and the ease of customisation. Although the default settings and icon pack are ugly, with the tweaks tool and shell extensions, you can make gnome look similar to most other OS’s.
Honestly, if I were the OP, I would shop around the different DEs and see which one I like the most. For me, Gnome was the best choice.