i3wm for me, no DE. I do like KDE when I run a DE though.

maybe something like xfce or a tiling window manager would have the lowest recurce cost

KDE because I want a setup that just works.

Sway mixed with KDE,
games don't really like it and Pipewire doesn't work for video recording for some reason (it has to do with the KDE xdg-desktop-portal) but it's a small price to pay for salvation I guess.

I know Sway is a window manager, not a DE - but KDE applications and services seem to fill the gaps.
They're not necessary, but you won't catch me dead with a GTK file chooser popup open, and I haven't figured out how to set up Ranger to replace Dolphin (nor do I really want to).

I use mostly KDE plasma, especially for gaming, but sometimes switch to Hyprland for online Pen and Paper, since i prefer the automated tiling when opening tons of documents

@sambeastie@lemmy.world Hyprland, but technically it's a tiling window manager and Wayland compositor.

Hyprland + waybar and bemenu. Not truly a DE, but I love the look and the minimalism and I like to do things in the CLI anyway.

I switched to just using a window manager two years ago, and I haven't looked back since. Currently using qtile (WM written and configured in python) and it was pretty straight forward to install/configure. This is the video that made me want to try it out.

No DE. dwm

I'm not even sure.

Whatever comes with mint? I had a hard drive die, and my buddy hooked me up when I realized I couldn't read the windows key on the sticker any more. He was going to do some kind of fuckery to let me keep 7 despite that, but he'd been talking about Linux for a few years, so I asked what he thought about that.

He asked me a few questions, about what kind of programs I need to use, and when none of them were a pain in the ass for an idiot like me to deal with, he set it up for me. Told me it was mint, helped me set things up where they look nice and made sure I have what I need. Haven't fucked with anything since, and that was about two years ago.

KDE Plasma xorg. I use discord streaming quite a bit with friends so Wayland isn't an option and I'm not using a third party discord client since that's against discord ToS.