[dmytrish]

I use KDE because I like its relatively polished design and philosophy of flexibility and empowering power users. I can and I do wrestle things that I don't like into a shape I like.

I still have to put up with many, many downsides around its stability, bugs, resource consumption, being written in C++ and builds being a nontrivial exercise.

I can sympathize with those for whom KDE does not suit well.

[eitland]

What distro do you use and what do you compare it to?

My preferred distro is KDE Neon, based on Ubuntu base but with KDE devs providing the KDE layer on top.

I have found this combination excellent and while I am sure it uses more resources than lightweight distros it actually seems to save me resources when I move load (IntelliJ, VSCode, Cypress) from my Windows host machine to my KDE running under WSL. Even on the limited memory and CPU I give this VM it seems to handle them a lot nicer than when I run the GUI apps in the host machine and only run Maven/Quarkus + Node + WSL part of VSCode on WSL.

And with the most recent update of WSL, running GUI apps from WSL has become effortless. (I admit some rough edges like IntelliJ sometimes freezing after suspend resume etc, but nothing that takes time or effort to resolve.)

[dmytrish]

My comment was overly dramatic, I'd say. I was implicitly comparing KDE to Apple-level quality in UI.

I am using KDE on Wayland on Fedora, and so far it's the most polished Linux desktop experience I've ever had.

Maybe it's my experience with KDE4 that turned me off after KDE3, then tidal changes of stability in KDE5 that undermined my trust.