Linux

I'm the weirdo over in the corner using TDE (Trinity Desktop Environment, forked from KDE3) on both my desktop and laptop.

I went with i3 (i3wm) instead of a full DE on my debian laptop. I wanted to minimize trackpad use without requiring peripherals (like a mouse).

On one hand it's highly performant and easily configurable; on the other hand, it does lead to problems that I wouldn't have known about with a DE—for example, I had screen tearing for months until I learned I needed a compositor, which doesn't come included.

In other words: it is a very barebones OOBE, and requires a lot of setup and RTFM (it's probably in the user guide that i need a compositor), but the reward of higher performance/lower power draw, easily configuring the hell out of it, smoothly navigating everywhere with the keyboard alone, and reclaiming screenspace from taskbars and titlebars has made it my preferred setup (even on desktop).

Tangential to the question, but my "no mouse" ethic has taken considerable effort to learn the cli way of dealing with configuration that is trivialized by GUIs (e.g. volume and wifi, i'm still struggling with bluetooth and rtorrent), but it's made the experience of working on a laptop 500% more enjoyable and less of an uphill struggle against the trackpad, and it doesn't require a flat surface for a mouse.

DE: KDE & Cinnamon. WM: Awesome & I3

I'm really liking Budgie, can't wait for version 11 when they ditch the gnome libs/apps.

@aMalayali I'm quite happy with Cinnamon in the moment but I know what you mean. If my daily work experience with Cinnamon would suffer, I would also go back to XFCE.

On my laptops I like the same one as on my desktops: KDE Plasma. With any other I quickly start missing the features that KDE Plasma offers and the configurability and customizability. And It is also quite lightweight for all that it offers. Others often offer much less and consume more resources then KDE Plasma.