[qwerty456127]

> I loved KDE3, maybe it had some issues but it mostly Just Worked as a Windows XP-like desktop environment.

But Windows XP had way more polished look&feel (as did any other Windows version). KDE 3 looked ugly. KDE 4 looked OK but kind of wasteful in terms of screen area.

> KDE4 was unusably broken for years and years, it's basically why I stopped using a Linux desktop.

I just went to XFCE which has hardly changed at all since then. XFCE is always a perfect fallback DE for weird times. I also went XFCE (for about a year or 2 every time) when Unity was first introduced and when it got retired. I just disabled the standard XFCE panels and added a 3-rd party dock instead.