In the "good old times" I used KDE 2.x and then KDE 3.x. After the KDE 4.x fiasco, I switched to GNOME and mostly stayed with it until now. But in the last few years, I've been very disappointed with GNOME because of the decision to drop support for the desktop icons. Call me whatever you want, but I find the desktop icons very useful for temporary files or anything like notes. It's a big deal dropping them and there's no decent shell-extension to replace their original functionality. Ubuntu 20.04 was released with an embarrassing alpha-level extension for the icons. Only recently, the "Desktop Icons NG (DING)" was released, which is still not good enough IMHO, but at least does not cause crashes. In other words, I believe Gnome has taken a risky path and will likely loose many users for some of its decisions, as already happened in the transition GNOME 2 -> GNOME 3. GNOME 4.x wants to be fancy like MacOS's user interface, but not even Apple dared to remove the desktop icons. Trying to "innovate" at any cost is risky.
Now, on some machines I started to use again KDE, version 5.x and I realized that's great. Stable, fully-featured, customizable and it consumes very little memory, a little less than XFce!! As far I as know after doing some research, a few years ago KDE was a monster, but then the team decided to invest seriously in optimizing its memory footprint in order to make KDE more competitive and now it's pretty lightweight compared to GNOME. So, I'm now seriously considering to gradually switch back to it.
For a couple of years I think I had a crush on LXDE, but I abandoned it because it's not maintained well-enough and, apparently, it's destined to die, being replaced by LXQT, which is worse, at least for the time I've used it. Its essential for me a desktop environment to work smoothly and handle well all the corner cases.
_________________ Tilck, a Tiny Linux-Compatible Kernel: https://github.com/vvaltchev/tilck
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