A friend of mine just made this switch. His biggest reason was Latte Tasks, which he says is much better than any of the similar docks available for XFCE.
I'm making assumptions here about your use case, but probably not. XFCE users are typically closer to the terminal than, say, Gnome or Plasma users. You'd be better served by i3, I imagine.
I have XFCE on my laptop and KDE and i3 on my desktop. Two things I like about KDE over XFCE are the system settings app and I just prefer the look of Qt widgets.
I think so, but what exactly depends on what you need. Commonly liked features are:
- User intuitive widgets that can be easily dragged around in panels with a third party store directly in Plasma itself, containing useful widgets such as calendar events sync and todo lists
- Complete customization but also pretty by default and getting better; browse third party colorschemes, plasma themes, global themes, panel layouts (latte), application styles (kvantum), etc etc
- Powerful notification system that allows you to reply inline to telegram messages, embed screenshots so you can drag those around [https://postimg.cc/q6qLMXK1], embed files that you can also drag around + interact with, sticky notifications for ongoing operations - still having the ability to go with a do not disturb mode for a custom time and set notification importance in a granular way
- Powerful integration with phone (see phone battery, see and send messages, see incoming calls, see/stop/play videos [youtube / vlc] playing on the pc from the phone, see phone notifications, and so on) and integration with browsers (native notifications, native downloads [see notifications above], search and open browser tabs from krunner, etc)
- Powerful search (krunner) that can check spelling errors, find browser tabs, convert units, do mathematical operations, search the apps store, run command line programs, open locations, see recent documents, add task to the todo list (zanshin), supports third party runners, etc etc etc
- System tray that only shows relevant widgets so you can keep it minimalist but without loosing any possibly useful option (system tray elements for usb drives, night color, display configuration, clipboard, vaults, media playback, printers, kate sessions, etc etc)
- Third party stuff like Latte and Kvantum that allows you to customize your desktop in any way imaginable (quick browse for "Plasma" on r/unixporn will confirm this)
- Consistent apps that follow the general theme, some of them also convergent, e.g. all maui apps (index [files], vvave [music], buho [notes], pix [images], ...) work exactly the same on desktop and on your Android phone as well, so you don't have to learn to use different applications on each OS
- Light and fast. Yeah, I know xfce is very light and fast, but Plasma 5 is very light as well recently. I have a pinebook, the $100 machine, and it's usable both with Plasma and xfce (both uses around 340mib of RAM there).
- Kontact suite with Akonadi integration that allows for various apps all integrated with each other (todo from one app will appear in the other), with the generic Kontact app containing all them and being able to show a dashboard with all recent notes, to-dos, events, mails etc.
- Support for phones with Plasma mobile and other tech things (e.g.: TVs afaik and the mycroft thing), with Plasma Mobile using the same underlying plasma base component, so it's consistent + compatible
- Any application you could need, there are a lot of those all made by the KDE community, and those are all following the KDE human interface guidelines and following the global theme, so that's nice
...I kinda lost track of time, sorry for the essay, I just think that Plasma is great and this is how I can best explain why