[BirAdam]

I may be alone in this, but I personally feel that older GUIs were better than modern ones visually. I really and unironically think that IRIX, CDE, Win3, OS/2 Warp, and KDE1 look better than what has come after. Sadly, software has actually improved measurably in almost every other way (if you disagree, your memories are a bit rose tinted, cuz… uh… not hard restarting due to crashes is nice) and these GUIs are therefore somewhat unusable today. Also, other commenters are spot on. There are a ton of different WMs and toolkits and everything… and most of them require so much fiddling.

For full desktops: Plasma is great, but I personally dislike it for a reason I can’t put my finger on. GNOME is great once I install about 12 plugins, but then those break on updates, and I cannot stand the default GNOME experience. XFCE is “fine” but lacks some refinement. Budgie is on life support it seems. I haven’t tried enlightenment in a while. Never tried Deepin.

[beagle3]

Ubuntu's Unity on 14.04 was top GUI for me. It worked well at least through 18.04 even after it was no longer the default. I was using a Mac at the time as well, and I have since moved to Mac (still on Catalina ...).

There were no things from the Mac I was missing with Unity. There are still things on the Mac that I miss from Unity (most notably, the multiple dots indicating the number of open windows, and the setting where the screen that does NOT have the default window can be subtly dimmed)

[_mlbt]

WindowMaker is great if you enjoy the NeXTStep look and feel.

[socar]

you're not alone in this. On Windows side I tend to tweak as much as I can to get back to WinNT/Classic look. Thanks to XFCE and Win2K theme I can get this done as well, however Microsoft never even consider giving choice to people and ability to replace the UI. Maybe killing explorer.exe and running total commander as primary is something for long term to consider...

[prirai]

Give LXQT a try.

[syeare]

LXQt is excellent in terms of resource efficiency and snappiness, although I suspect the person you replied to will have the same issue with it as they stated they had with XFCE (not "refined"?). It's a much lighter desktop environment than XFCE, from what I remember when I last tested them (~200MB vs XFCE's 0.5GB+).

It's a continuation of LXDE which was absorbed into another project when LXDE was discontinued, iirc

[pg_1234]

Cinnamon

Best obtained via LMDE

[ElCapitanMarkla]

I like to muck around with different DEs which is one of the main reasons I moved to Nixos. I moved from KDE to Cinnamon last year and that has been my favourite. I’m quite excited to try Cosmic, I’ve got a couple of Wayland issues I need to solve before I can though.