[DocTomoe]

KDE lost me when they moved from the relatively stable (and - let's face it - pretty Windows 9x-style) KDE 3.5 to KDE 4. It was promised as a quantum leap, but Plasma came over as unstable, unfinished, and lacking a lot of the functionality I came to love with the 3.5 stack.

In the end, I gave up, went to window managers instead to full DEs, then to i3, and now am on a Mac.

Still, I remember 3.5 fondly. The last good Linux Desktop Environment (Gnome tried so hard, but always was a bit too 'our way or the highway' when KDE allowed for some customization)

[usrnm]

KDE 3 to KDE 4 transition really was painful, it pushed me away as well, but it also happened over 15 years ago. I gave it a shot a few years back, and it was great, much better than modern-day Gnome in my opinion.

[MegaDeKay]

Thanks for stating this. It puzzles me how people can still hold a grudge against the transition to KDE4 that happened back in early 2008. It took a while but even KDE4 got pretty good. KDE6 is great and if you follow Nate Graham's blog, you can see the improvements that go into it every week.

https://blogs.kde.org/authors/nategraham/

[JohnFen]

> It puzzles me how people can still hold a grudge against the transition to KDE4 that happened back in early 2008.

I don't think it's people holding a grudge, I think it's people who got burned and are hesitant to touch that burner again because they don't want to get burned twice.

[DocTomoe]

See ... that' nice and everything, and I applaud those who invest their time in building something they clearly love. But the time for me to fiddle with my DE, which essentially is a supporting technology, meant to make other, more meaningful work easier, is much rather spend sitting in the garden and watching my nephews grow up these days.

I don't want to invest migration of workflows and time to understand a new UI paradigm for a system that once catastrophically crashed and burned something good on the altar of 'new and innovative and unfinished'.

That's not a grudge. It's growing older and setting other priorities in life.

[jraph]

Early versions of KDE 4.0 were terrible, and it lasted for a couple of years, but I've found later versions quite solid. Early versions of KDE 5 were relatively stable but were lacking features. I find late 5.X versions and all 6.X version quite robust.

There are still bugs but they do seem to be ironing them out, they go in the right direction.

The only big bugs I notice these days are the occasionnal plasmashell crashes but it comes back on its own. KWin doesn't crash and that's fortunate because on Wayland, that would bring down non KDE apps.

I exclusively use plasma, I'm quite sensitive to instabilities, it's not an issue for me with KDE.

I did avoid the first years of KDE 4 and was using GNOME at that time.

Have you tried Trinity?

[wkat4242]

It's not really windows 9x style? It's highly configurable so you can make it look like that but you don't have to. Even without theming it.

I find it a lot more sensible than windows especially because the latter started embedding ads and "helpful suggestions" everywhere in the UI.

[DocTomoe]

I'm not talking about theming, but the general feel of the UI. It did not try and win innovation trophies back in the day, it was a platform that gave you the feeling it was ready for serious work to be done on, relatively stable, similar UI language over several programs, that kind of thing. Konqueror as the dual file manager / web browser was great, but it was "something on top", not "something radically different from proprietary UIs" like Gnome kept doing in that timeframe.

I think it was the closest we ever came to a 'Linux on the Desktop' year for a mass market.