Tried KDE a few months back for a short time, was surprised that KDE's footprint (in mb of space on disk, not ram) was not that much heavier than LXQT. The desktop experience seemed polished, though for me it has far too much gimmickery (in settings), and at this point I'm quite used to Ubuntu's Gnome. But happy for a healthy ecosystem. When I got into Linux (back in ~2008 probably?), I remember the choice with regards to full DEs was KDE vs Gnome vs XFCE vs LXDE ; there are more today, but I would hate to see one of them gone for good, and wish all of them well. Good to read that KDE seems healthy.
- Split window, so you can have two explorers right next to each other.
- Tabs
- If you drag a file/folder into another folder, you get prompted about “copying or moving?”
In terms of health, I also appreciate that many of the devs frequent the kde subreddit, and they all seem really chill and receptive.
Back when I tested them out (years ago, so not relevant today, still): Considering dependencies (if not running KDE), but even then Dolphin always seemed to do something quite not intuitively for me. Can't name examples anymore.
Different people, different tools.
About the menu, it is nice, but not unique. Windows' Explorer, for example, shows it when dragging with the right mouse button. Options include copying, moving, zipping and actions from any registered shell handlers.
That said, I think KDE is still the best desktop environment across all the operating systems I've tried.
"Just use your window manager" - and have two separate Dolphin windows? I mean, yeah. But it's very nice to have everything contained in one window. Right now I have five Dolphin tabs, four of which have split windows (I don't NEED this setup, but I like it).
I still see some weird artefacts / behaviour in Dolphin, notably around the sizing of the quick-access panels on the left, after window resizing, or display switching (effectively causing the former).
The copy/move option was present in Konqueror also, along with the same ctrl/shift modifier option to force copy / move without the pop-up.
FWIW with Microsoft Windows, for as long as I can remember, in Explorer you can right-mouse drag directory entries around, to trigger a similar copy/move pop-up. A little-known feature, but increasingly handy as Microsoft continues its war on its own users and obfuscates actual locations & paths, with the default move-if-on-the-same-drive / copy-if-not becoming harder to intuit due to these location abstractions.
One person's gimmickry is another's convenience.
Does the alleged surfeit of configuration options materially affect your usage of KDE, or just offends your sensibilities that they're available?
The only real problem KDE has now are the scars of past mistakes that have kept people away and all too often mired in Gnome.
And that's a shame, because OpenSUSE is excellent. If KDE continues to thrive SUSE deserves a lot of credit for keeping it alive.