If you're looking for Fluxbox, Window Maker, Enlightenment or similar options - they are in the Window Manager of the Year poll.

--jeremy

If any, it'd have to be Xfce for me.

The only one I have played with lately is Xfce, but really I have no horse in this race.

I voted MATE.

Same choice as one year ago: XFCE

I thought I'd never like KDE again, but it's coming along pretty well.

I put in my insane vote for Shell. It's come along well too. Still needs work but much better than last year at this point.

Voted LinuxMint 16 Cinnamon, definitely a major improvement, not only for this distro but also in comparison to others!

Cinnamon no doubts. But I would like to render my respect for mate, xfce and lxde. KDE is basically a dinosaur. Gnome is trying hard to get something revolutionary, but they dont know exactly where is their target.

I respectfully disagree about KDE. The desktop itself is very customizable. You can get Folder View or Search and Launch, to name only two, (which makes Gnome, Unity and even MS Metro look sad. If only they gave people the choice like KDE does.) The widgets are great as well and it is very stable. I either use that classic KDE menu or lately I am using Lancelot as well as Search and Launch on one monitor and Folder View on my second monitor.

I do like Cinnamon, Mate, XFCE and LXDE as well. So I am not saying they are bad at all.

I apologize for the bad choice of the word "dinosaur". I was not willing to give the idea that KDE is bad/obsolete. I realize that this was the first impression by your answer. When I wrote "dinosaur" I was thinking about "heavy". I tried KDE sometimes and it always seems to me slower than all other. There are a lot of people that has KDE as their first choice for DE and this is very important, because from the conflict of ideas we have the evolution.

All is good. I understand what you meant now. I think that is the biggest comparison between KDE, Gnome, Unity and Mate, XFCE, LXDE. The latter are easier on some systems that need to have less resources used or by users that wish to have lighter DE's. Of course an even lighter choice could be Fluxbox, IceWM or some other window manager. I started using KDE again when I had my dual core, 64bit CPU 2.4Ghz with 4GB of ram and an Nvidia GT220. It worked great with that. I now use it with a Quadcore 3.8Ghz 64bit and 8GB of ram and an Nvidia GT630 and of course it works great with that. However when I tried to use KDE on an older computer I had, 32bit AMD (2300+ I think,) with 1GB of ram and an Nvidia 6200, I was only able to get LXDE to work on it with Debian Stable. KDE was just not getting the job done.

That is the great thing about it all, as you said, the conflict of ideas. Plus the flexibilty of opensource gives us so many options that no matter ones choice, none of us can be wrong no matter what we choose.

As with KDE 4 and Gnome 3, I was somewhat horrified when Unity was first released, as it seemed a giant step backward. However, with time comes maturity, and all three have definitely grown on me and now seem quite productive. I'm particularly fond of Unity's Dash for quickly opening files and apps, and look forward to the new Qt-based Unity that dynamically scales from phone to tablet to desktop to TV.

(I'm fine with the other options as well, but they were all pretty good when I first tried them. ;-)

Cinnamon

I don't really like any of them. XFCE only seems to show up in my mind because it's found a nice spot balance of customization, feature set and it doesn't look too bad. It's sort of my boring and stable tool that never changes (a positive!).

I think Gnome 3/Shell might be my choice, if only because there are some awesome DEs that have used it as a starting point (Unity, Cinnamon, whatever they call it in Elementary OS) and made some really good looking and functional environments. I think that has more to do with some of the design sensibilities of Gnome than what their particular stylistic choices are at any point, and I'll take good design over goofy style this year!

Ouch!