After trying out Cosmic, Gnome,KDE Plasma, and Hyprland, I feel like plasma is the most usable for me coming from Windows. It solves the gripes I had about lack of customizability while still starting me off with a familiar homebar. I will be going back and forth with gnome for a while.
I really like gnome and the sliding desktops, and all the extensions seem to make it very customizable as well, but not directly like plasma, instead you mix and match (or make) extensions to get the look you want. (correct me if im wrong, I used it for a day)
Hyprland seems very nice for multitasking but the keyboard focus of the presets ive tried doesn’t really appeal to me, I like being able to just use my mouse sometimes.
Cosmic, is definitely an alpha and im interested to see what it becomes, wont be using it now.
I started out on Cinnamon (via Mint). Although I have used Ubuntu many moons ago but despised Gnome and never touched it since. After Mint In went to Arch where I DE hopped for many years. I tried XFCE (didn’t like the visual inconsistences); Openbox - liked and loved for quite a while as a minimalist setup; Mate - too old looking so didn’t last; Deepin - lasted a very long time because I loved it so much but eventually stopped because they changed the design too much to be link Windows; Budgie which lasted a little while and was the next closest to what Deep in provided. Was too immature at the time to be enjoyed long term; Pantheon - I still love Pantheon. It’s consistent, polished and cohesive. To me a perfect blend of nice looking, minimal and functional. Stopped using because I got tired of having to fix it on Arch; Finally KDE. It’s what I’ve been using for several years now because it just works, it looks nice, it’s very customisable (I can make my desktop look similar to Pantheon), I like the integration and ecosystem of apps, it has great support and devs that listen… I’m yet to have a DE tempt me away from it. Not even Cosmic lol.