DWM

Never used hyprland but Sway you can use the mouse to move stuff around, resize windows, etc. just hold down you mod key, usually super/windows key. If you have a bar setup correctly you can even click between workspaces or have a task list like on windows that you can click on. Alt Tab needs some re-imagining as its now three dimensional, but that’s easy to tweak to how you want it with something like swayr. You can even add a start button equivalent if you wish.

I use Sway on Tumbleweed, before that Sway on Ubuntu. I have six main workspaces defined, odd numbered workspaces on my left monitor and evens on my right monitor. Both monitors are 32"@4k so a ton of real estate, I can easy fit in four large tiles per monitor, eight is a stretch but if you use the option to make windows full screen then you can run stuff in the background and then flip between things that are running in the background.

I use the layman add on to predefined layouts for my different workspaces, then bind apps on start up using my config to a particular workspace. I can still move them around, but automating as much as possible with a tiling windows manager is the secret IMO. Having everything just work and appear where I want with zero faffing around speeds up my workflow enormously. On Windows I use power-toys to provide a noddy version of tiling, but everything has to be done manually and its a complete PITA over a work day where I am opening and closing stuff.

As an example, I have my third workspace as my main coding workspace. Its divided into 3/4 and 1/4. The larger part I lock VS Code to it, the smaller part is usually a Firefox tab for reviewing documentation. My second workspace is my social workspace, that’s divided into four long quarters, one for music, one for discord, one for signal, one for mail. All of this, including binding the apps to the workspace, are fully automatic.

I use the keyboard for most things. I use QMK based keyboards (configured using Vial), so I can bind multi modifier shortcuts to just two keys either on a separate layer or a chord. Reducing the number of keys you press really helps the ergonomics of activating them, especially if you move them to the home row and away from the pink hell hole that is where the modifiers are on most standard keyboards.

I think the biggest problem is that it requires work to get the right add ons and make it work the way you want to work, but get it right and the WM becomes transparent to how you work.

I use Cosmic and really like it- have used i3, Awesome and Gnome in the past for a while too, I really likes them.

The most time I spent with a set up was Awesome + rofi, which I really enjoyed. I customised literally everything and spent hours tweaking stuff.

That was super fun, but in all honesty my workflow is more or less:

1. Open up a terminal (alacritty, tmux + fish shell + helix editor)
2. Open up a browser (Firefox, have played with others but there’s always some quirk where I give up)
3. That’s it.

Honestly, all the tweaking is fun for me, but with my workflow I have like 0 requirements for anything fancy. Daily driving cosmic is going nicely for now, and seems to mostly get out of my way.

I have been liking river lately after switching to it from hyprland. River is much more similar to my previous one which was xmonad.

Keep in mind that cosmic is still in an alpha build. It’s missing a lot of features and his buggy here are there. I’m sure it will be pretty awesome and once it releases it 1.0 version.

KDE and I keep it mostly stock. I usually get a compact desktop pager widget and add a kwin plugin to dynamically add/remove virtual desktops.

I just recently switched to using the COSMIC alpha, coming from KDE on my personal laptop and from GNOME on my work laptop. I absolutely love it. It’s very stable and polished for still being in alpha.

I really like its tiling and workspaces. The navigation just feels very natural to me. I am a very big fan of keyboard only navigation.

Since both of my laptops have hybrid graphics, I am also a fan of COSMIC’s approach to hybrid graphics, that it generally let’s you quite easily specify if you want to run an app on dGPU or iGPU.

And last of all it just looks gorgeous.

My preference is the opposite of yours. I just recently set up Hyprland and I love it for the focus on keyboard and the ease of customizing the keybinds.

The other thing I love is the tiling. I almost always have two windows side by side and in every other DE I’ve used (haven’t used cosmic), I always had to faff about to get my windows half and half or into the quarters. So pair that with the keyboard focus and hyprland is the winner for me.

I started using Windows as a young lad, but when I tried using Linux I easily transitioned to KDE. Then I tried Gnome and loved it, used it for a few years before moving over to Hyprland a couple of months ago and I can confidently say that I won’t be going back.

EDIT:
Forgot to mention that the main reason I love Hyprland is because of the crazy level of customization. I use it primarily on my laptop and can navigate easily with keyboard shortcuts, clicking, and even trackpad gestures.

Don’t let somebody else’s idea of how to use a DE limit you, just configure whatever you want!

XFCE and well, straightforward usage without endless tweaking and customization. On the other side, I recently(~2 years:)) felt in love with tiling window manager BSPWM and keyboard-driven usage.

Actually I like Cinnamom the best. For VMS without video accelertion, XFCE. For media center and my laptop I stayed with Ubuntu/Gnome.

Work flow. Any desktop will do, that is more about Apps. For me Firefox, LibreOffice esp Calc, Python, Bash, Thunderbird, ssh, Zim, Geany are what I use most.

CWM, calm window manager. It’s based off Plan 9’s Rio and made for OpenBSD, there is a Linux port. I also admit I use KDE sometimes.

Lxqt, with pcmanfm’s desktop ability turned off. I use the terminal for my file management anyway

I usually have several terminal tabs and web browser tabs open plus a tmux session. Neovim for coding and writing, feh and mpv for viewing media, mpd, supysonic, and minidlna for streaming and playing music.

Here’s mine, simple and functional

I went cold turkey to gnome and I use KDE on my laptop. Both configured to use super + type in what I want to open. I quit windows since I got used to it and they stopped providing it. I like both but gnome is way more finished while kde feels a bit janky at times. I really love the customization ability of KDE and I find once I messed up and had to reinstall once, I got over my urges to needlessly rice. I don’t know if it is distro specific but I am pretty upset fedora gnome does not have create new file under right click but you have to use terminal (goes completely against gnome philosophy) or to go edit hidden folders and use terminal to create a template (goes very against gnome philosophy).