This is where you can dump your complete opinion about any Desktop Env in linux independent of your distro.. or if there is a distro specific thing with it post it... ALL DE's accepted
My current setup is Ubuntu 15.04 Gnome Opensuse Hard drive kicked the bucket and I am lazy :P
NO WARRING and as always dont forget to like the thread if you posted :P i mean come on.. the thread needz the love man.. haha anyways be detailed if you want.. detailed opinions are preferred due to them actually possibly being helpful
It's so lightweight, and if you want to you can make it heavyweight. I prefer lightweight.
Base looks a bit ugly but can easily be made to look beautiful.
It's really modular.
Traditional or un-traditional, set it up how you want it. I prefer traditional with bar on top.
It's not bloated like some other DE, coming with a lot of software you probably won't use. Looking at you KDE.
One of the DE that really stands for freedom. A lot of the DE have pulseaudio and other strange dependencies that sometimes cause problems on some distros.
I've tried all the available desktop environments for Ubuntu/Debian while distro jumping before I recently settled down, I found that Unity and Cinnamon weren't very multi monitor friendly.
XFCE KDE and MATE however give you the option to create and customize panels out of the box, which is a huge plus for me personally. I like setting my main use display as default, so games open on that monitor, while still having full desktop functionality on my other monitor.
Gnome 3 is different however, games can open on my secondary monitor by default, and with Gnome 3's overlay I can very simply move the game over to my main display. I also really enjoy the extensions that are available with gnome.
It's honestly between xfce and and Gnome 3 for me, based purely off of functionality .
my preferred desktop environment for the most part
I've been using KDE for 8 years now, I might be a tad biased
has a new version - KDE Plasma 5 - coming out soon that looks very promising
default config is extremely similar to Windows
default config is ugly
decent amount of extensions available - desktop and panel widgets, themes et cetera
has the Krita - dark colour theme, which I really like the look of
the KDE suite of applications is really nice and includes a lot of really great programs I use often, such as Krita as an alternative to GIMP (Krita being more to my taste as a long time Paint.NET and occasional GIMP 2.6 user), and Kate (a text editor that has a lot of functionality that Notepad++ has, plus some more on top).
XFCE
nice looking, but less heavy alternative to KDE
decently well configurable, not as many options as KDE
customizable to a greater extent than GNOME3
twm
really old feeling
doesn't look too great
very dependable, it'll always work
works on pretty much all devices imaginable
openbox
quite minimal, still has a lot of neat stuff I'm used to
basically like twm, but less of that "this is really fucking old" feeling
LXDE
basically openbox with a nice menu and taskbar and notification icon area attached
performs very well, looks alright, quite like it on older devices that also have to be used by other people from time to time
GNOME 3
looks nice
customizable as much as I usually need it to be
easy to use and pick up after someone presses the Win key for you and you understand what that does
seems to not like me
serious lack of configurable things in the settings menu, some stuff is flat out missing
GNOME 2
does not look terribly nice in my opinion
okay to use I guess
don't really like this one much, don't really passionately hate it either
awesome wm
quite minimal
have to start most things from the terminal
lots of keyboard shortcuts to learn (not really hard ones, but you have to learn them to be able to use awesome effectively)
quite fast to use once you get used to it I guess
not my kind of thing except on PCs that only have a single display such as laptops
lacks a lot out of the box, such as a network connection manager (nm-applet works) or a battery indicator
