I use KDE. Some use GNOME. Most other options are probably to be left out as X11 is unsafe.
Cosmic is not nearly finished, but will probably be a bit safer, as its in rust, even though not tested.
Then there are window managers like Sway, Hyprland, waymonad, wayfire, etc.
RaspberryPi also has their own Wayland Desktop.
Is every Wayland Desktop / WM equally safe, what are other variables here like language, features, control over permissions, etc?
reading your comments, you like to say that someone has “missed the point”.
well, my point is, you should not ignore the DE. i mean, you can, if you can bypass the login as is, sure. but from a user perspective, you should not ignore it, because the DE is a potential security risk. e.g. if your screen lock crashes and whatnot.
sure, yes indeed, your DE can be as secure as you want and it doesn’t matter if your underlying system is not secure. and yes indeed, with any non-encrypted drive, you can just mount the drives on another system (e.g. boot the computer from a USB drive). that almost goes without saying imo, and of course that’s why an encrypted drive is recommended.
the question is, how easy is it to get to the stuff with an encrypted drive when the system is booted and the encrypted drive(s) is (are) mounted? it is not that easy. and there, the quality of your screen lock setup is the biggest risk factor, usually. if you can crash your DE/WM somehow, if it is not setup right with your display manager or something, then you might be able to get into a login (and interactive) shell of that user (maybe because it is the parent process of your WM that you started with
startx).if you “allow” your potential attacker to reboot from a usb stick, then it is obvious that your DE doesn’t matter at all pretty much.
Well especially if the previous comment asked “or am I missing something”.
Obviously I could be wrong that’s why I said I THINK