I dont actually screw around with the de's at all anymore.
Around 10 years ago when i started using Ubuntu (had a brief encounter with suse a few years before that) i did use one of the docks (also used OSX on macmini). That were still gnome 2 Ubuntus.
Then the next version suddenly had unity. And oh neat, it had a dock on the left exactly as my gnome 2 setup.
Then had a brief debian encounter on my Mac mini. Back then also had played with tiling window managers like twm i think. The one included in xorg by default.
Then used fedora on and off for a few years.
Nowadays it is mainly this that i use:
2)OS Home Enterprise
1 Laptop: Manjaro Korora (installs LVM by default)
2 Desktop: Mint OpenSuse (installs BTRFS/XFS by default)
3 Server: Xubuntu CentOS (installs XFS by ?default) [both from 2004]
Only change wallpaper nowadays.