[suby]

I think Cinnamon is really underrated. It has sane defaults, is reasonably performant, and will be familiar to anyone coming from Windows.

In general I feel that Gnome has terrible defaults, and are hostile to the user making changes away from these defaults. It's also less performant than Cinnamon -- animations can lag on my machine for example, and my machine isn't exactly bad.

I think Plasma is nice, and it's certainly more customizable than Cinnamon, but I think this comes at the cost of reliability and an overall feeling of cohesiveness. I also think there's a point where you don't want every right click menu to contain an option which allows you to fundamentally change the functionality of your desktop.

I'd probably be using XFCE or Mate if Cinnamon didn't exist.