I did my fair share of DE hopping in my younger days, but now when I use the Linux desktop in anger I've found myself returning to GNOME. It's the only desktop environment on Linux that actually feels like an opinionated, cohesive whole, in the same way that macOS used to be. It certainly has shortcomings and annoyances, but instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater I decided to meet it halfway, and found myself rewarded for my patience with being able to get work done.

Interestingly, I've also found that the further a distro diverges from upstream GNOME, the worse my experience ends up being. I was frankly shocked at how many paper cuts I ran into the last time I used the Ubuntu spin of GNOME, while Debian was better and Fedora gave me almost no trouble.