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

Kde plasma. Because it is what I have used for 20+ years and I am too lazy to switch.

My traditional setup is Sawfish. No desktop environment, just Sawfish, xterm, emacs, and a browser. I still run this today on a Debian desktop at home and a RHEL VM at work. Occasionally I swap Sawfish for StumpWM (I have an old X220 around here where I thought a tiling WM would make better use of the tiny screen). Lately I also run MATE on Ubuntu for my laptop, having realized I can configure it to feel close enough to my old Sawfish setup.

I really don't like the idea of desktop environments. They aspire to control your whole computer, and replace all of your applications with their own - their own mail reader, their own media player, their own text editor, their own PDF viewer, etc. This has been my impression even since the 1.0 days of GNOME and KDE. They feel like a collection of shovelware.

I'm running Arch Linux with GNOME on Wayland. It's mostly perfect for me out-of-the-box, however I have customized it to my liking with the help of a few extensions:

- ArcMenu: https://gitlab.com/arcmenu/ArcMenu

- Dash to Dock: https://micheleg.github.io/dash-to-dock/

- Lock Keys: https://github.com/kazysmaster/gnome-shell-extension-lockkey...

- Tray Icons Reloaded: https://github.com/MartinPL/Tray-Icons-Reloaded

I also change a few things using GNOME Tweaks; namely setting the application theme to Orchis-grey-dark-compact (https://github.com/vinceliuice/Orchis-theme), icon theme to Flatery-Dark (https://github.com/cbrnix/Flatery) and system font to Inter (https://rsms.me/inter/).

I've been using this setup for quite a while and I've been very happy with my computing experience, both in terms of aesthetics and overall UX. I tried tiling WMs for a while (first KWin and then i3 / Sway) but I found that I'm just a messy person who tends to be more productive with a floating WM.

I'll second you on floating + snaps with the keyboard. I think overlapping and stacking is too natural to dispense with completely.

I've been using PopOS which is GNOME plus Pops Shell - their custom tiling WM.

I tried i3 before but it sometimes broke with certain apps and took way too much fiddling to configure.

The nice thing about Pop Shell is that there's no config, and when I'm confused or doing something simple, I can just turn it off and use a regular floating style WM. It lets me focus on doing stuff rather than learning hundreds of keybindings and the internals of a WM.