Which is better: e4 or d4?

Probably d4, but I can play either way. People who fight over this take the game too seriously. I doubt the pros would ever have a heated debate over this. Ever.

According to the engine e4 is better by a tiny margin. It doesn't actually matter though. Play what you like!

They are both theoretically fine but d4 is much more boring and lame so e4

True, although exaggerated - but then when you consider that about 2/3rds of games start with e4... no longer true.

This just tells me you don't know how to respond to it.

While my own view is that both 1. e4 and 1. d4 are good, and in the end one should focus on which one leads to games you enjoy more, I thought I would do some simple searches here:
https://old.chesstempo.com/game-database.html

I limited the games to ones where both players had a minimum rating of 2500, and then looked for games that opened 1. e4 and 1. d4, where White wins, draws, or loses. As it didn't take very long, I also did the same for games that started 1. c4, 1. f4, 1. Nf3 1. Nc6, 1. e3 and 1. d3 (obviously some of those are not common, but it was more for fun). In total, I ended up with 402,150 games, with 80.7% of them starting either 1. e4 or 1. d4, all the way down to 113 games (0.03%) that started with 1. d3. Unfortunately, I don't see any way to limit the search based upon time controls, and the data base includes things like Title Tuesday, and so forth, so these numbers are based upon a mix of time controls, and OTB and Online games.
I've listed the openings in terms of their "popularity" (most games played to least), with e4 edging out d4. So, if one considers "best" to be the one chosen by top level players most often, then e4 is slightly more preferred.

Next, I converted the number of wins, draws, etc, to percentages, and also scored things as "not a loss" (combining wins and draws), and we get the following (in the same order as above, so I've bolded the best value - highest %wins, highest % draws, lowest %Losses (which is of course redundant with highest %not a loss):

So if you consider what has the best chance of a win as white, then again, e4 slightly edges past d4, although the best win rate was Nc3 (but given that's based upon only 250 games, I think we could view that as "tentative" ). Basically, looking at these, the chances of winning with White are very similar for e4, d4, c4, Nf3, and f4, and while some of the others look better, given the small sample of games I wouldn't make much of it (and also, I highly doubt those have many, if any, classical OTB games in them).

Of course, if your goal is to draw, then d4 edges out e4 as the better choice, and it has a slightly lower %losses as well. Hence, if one considers best as being the choice with the lowest chance of losing (rather than the highest chance of winning), then d4 has the lead over e4, but both are less preferable than 1. c4.

I've put the full list of rankings together as well:

What I found most interesting is that really, the chances of winning (with White) doesn't really seem to matter all that much, and even some of the less common openings (Bird's, Van't Kruijs, etc) show White winning a similar percentage of their games as the more common e4, d4, c4, and Nf3. However, those less common first move choices are less likely to end in a draw, so there's a greater chance to lose the game despite no real increase in the chance to win. There are, of course, possible reasons for this beyond just the first move choice, but I suppose if one considers it "best" for a game to end decisively, so "not a draw", then perhaps 1. d3 is for you!

e4 is a bit better than d4

e4

I made a forum about e4 please check it out. Please click here.

Its better e4 best by test

d4 is obviously better but d3 is best.

C4 is better

d3 is better than a3 or h3, don't you already know that?

White can play anything on move 1 and not suffer anything worse than = for it.

...because what?