Ask HN: What's your Linux window manager and/or desktop environment?

100% get that attitude.

I'm in the phase of slowly trying to learn Linux, and it's fun. But it also quickly becomes clear that there is no reward at the end. The endless different config file formats, man pages, shell mantras etc. don't really make computing any better in the end. They don't help one run CAD software, do CFD, write software, edit videos, make music, or any of the other things that are really what computing is about. Perhaps Ubuntu is the forever-distro after all.

fvwm, since 1998.

I've started to use the new version 3 on desktop. But it still has got some problems when connecting/disconnecting monitors, so I use version 2 on the laptop where I need to do that.

No DE, unless you count LXQt as a basic session manager. I don't know why, but it seems things works more smoothly with a session manager instead of just starting fvwm from .xsession.

Cinnamon. Every once in a while I try again Gnome and KDE but quickly go back to Cinnamon. It's the only DE where I'm mostly fine with the defaults. Everything else has to be tuned to death to be even remotely decent. Or they just crash because I have one monitor that requires HiDPI scaling and the other doesn't. I'm sad, nothing we have today is as good as Gnome 2 was.

I’ve been using elementary OS (Pantheon) and I like so much about it, yet still often find it feeling a bit limited as a daily driver for software development work.

I’d like to try Gnome 40+ with one more distro hop, but if that doesn’t stick, then I’m likely to head back to KDE Plasma (Manjaro) since that’s been the best Linux experience I’ve had so far. Sane defaults, yet still easily customizable wherever I felt the need to.

Arch, i3wm. Love having a personalized keyboard-first setup that I can say I've built over time.

A tip for those who may just be starting out: switch your LEFT-ALT and WIN keys. Also make caps lock act like ESC on tap and CTRL on long press. See xmodmap, setxkbmap and xcape for this.