[topspin]

My weapon of choice is kubuntu since 18.04 LTS. The only complaint I have is that konsole's cut/paste/selection mechanism eventually ceases to work (copy or select does nothing, old buffer contents remain) after a konsole process has been running for a few weeks.

Unlike your desire for effects, I prefer KDE because you can still completely disable effects and the compositing that make it performant and get excellent, glitch free remote desktop performance over a fast local network using VNC; almost no perceptible lag in normal development actively.

KDE has matured. They took the 4.x fiasco to heart and now KDE development is highly conservative and unobtrusive. I'm frankly amazed; popular Linux desktop environments have such a long history of design failures due to iconoclasts blowing everything up that the current state of KDE seems almost miraculous.