[znpy]

unironically if that's what you're complaining about, you might have liked kde3 a lot (yes, it's been 15 years and i still miss it).

anyway, kde is very configurable so most likely you might bend it to your liking, had you been somehow forced into kde.

> KDE being ugly makes it really hard to switch to

have you considered XFCE ? to me it's the best so far: it does all the things i need, it's fast and it isn't dumbed down like gnome.

It's not on wayland yet, but frankly I don't care much about the X11 vs Wayland debacle (though i slightly side with Xorg). Essentially I run whatever XFCE needs.

When XFCE will run on wayland, I'll run on wayland I guess.

[JohnFen]

> you might have liked kde3 a lot (yes, it's been 15 years and i still miss it).

You're not the only one. Ah, the poignancy of reminiscing about loves that we've lost.

[amlib]

kde3 with kdemod and the breathtaking choices of _actual_ themes (not just color schemes or "accent color" bs, but a plethora of widget themes that could make it look like anything you wanted plus rich guis to customize any and everything) plus the "emulation" of windows 9x HIG which kde apps back then used to copy and even improve upon was the pinnacle of desktop OS for me. Every major OS has been a major downgrade since... :`(