Funny, I used to loathe KDE but I ended up with it by default after trying out NixOS for the first time and... I haven't left. It's great. Just fabulous. I haven't felt the need to go back to a tiling WM yet, which I still find surprising...
i wasn't even too sad with them shipping features missing 90% of the old functionality while they got the code right, but doing that just to copy apple frivolous design choices was just too much.
Same here: I was a long-time xfce user but, over the years, I found myself using more and more KDE applications. For a friend I setup a Debian with the default KDE environment... I ended up using that myself - with not too many tweaks I just love it: the defaults are sane and if I want to change anything I can !
Has KDE changed that much or have I changed ?
Used to be I disliked KDE for 3 reasons: 1. it made me feel like I was Doing It Wrong and stuff sometimes didn't work if I didn't use K- programs for everything (and I disliked basically all of those), 2) it was the worst-performing and heaviest (disk, memory, everything) DE around, and 3) the config was insane, in a bad way—not that you could do it, but the GUI config manager was just a damn mess.
1 has improved a ton, 3 has improved a little, and 2 isn't true anymore—Gnome is much heavier and has terrible performance by comparison (try both on a resource-constrained device if you don't believe me).
I wouldn't be surprised if XFCE has gotten a little heavier, too, so the difference between the two isn't so stark. Especially default installs of XFCE on some distros, which include a lot of extras.
Try out Khronkite... It's a script that makes KWin into a tiling WM. I'm using it now.
Feels exactly like when Mac broke through 15 or so years ago: all the cool kids used it and advocated it, management wanted it and several people in IT preferred it and use it whenever they can get away with it.
I've had presentations where the Macbook couldn't sync and the Kubuntu Dell rescued me. Linux video is massively better than a few years ago thanks to AMD drivers being fully open source.
How many have a little pinguim 15 years later?
Another advantage.
Of course there are things like my Canoscan 4400F that has refused to work for years, but that is so rare I can remember that particular piece of trash a decade later.
Here is the thing, what you think about me, doesn't matter at all.