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I switched from Gnome to Plasma a little over a year ago after using Gnome for over a decade and it's better in every way. Reading your comment feels like I'm reading about the original KDE 4 release in 2008, not today.

>The Plasma versions seemed to embody change-for-change's sake, and were flaky in non-reproducible ways

I haven't noticed any major changes in the last year? Certainly nothing that was forced on me, whereas Gnome was always removing features I used, and the plugins would break with every update.

>I just want something simple, not as fugly as TWM, that lets me use focus-follows-mouse and several "weird" personal muscle memory shortcuts around mouse buttons and meta keys for window management actions

KDE does still let you do focus-follow-mouse and you can certainly add shortcuts, as you can in any other DE, in fact the dialogs to configure it are the same ones that are used in Gnome!

>Things like the compositor crashing, startup scripts not running in a reproducible way, weird behavior around multiple monitors and the dock sticking to the wrong edges etc.

Are you reporting these bugs? I cannot say that I have experienced these problems on any of my KDE machines and my friends that use KDE haven't complained about these problems either

>At first, I thought it was just me. Then I thought it was just FreeBSD, but every problem I've googled for (sddm most recently) has people from many different linux distros complaining about the same issues.

I mean, I just run Ubuntu. Maybe it -is- you? Even if it was SDDM, it's not like you have to use SDDM to use KDE -- I don't.

IDK this post just seems like a lot of FUD to me.

Ugh, gnome. I wanted to move from TWM to "something modern" in ~2001 when running FreeBSD on a DEC alpha as my desktop. I submitted patches to both KDE and Gnome to let their configurators accept my shortcuts. KDE took the patch, Gnome rejected it because it violated their human interface guidelines or some such. So I spent the last 20ish years with KDE.

Its not FUD. They took a stable, working desktop environment and made it more shiny, and less reliable.

I switched to LXQt for the same reasons. KDE is great on paper but Plasma has too many random bugs for me to enjoy (specifically Plasma; Kwin is fine.) I just want a basic and stable desktop environment with GUI configuration and and standard window management... I find that KDE provides some of those but sacrifices stability in an effort to be more than basic. For instance; configuring panels. In LXQt it's done mostly through context menus and setting windows, while in KDE it's supposed to be a more dynamic affair of dragging things around with your mouse. Well KDE's way of doing it has never worked well for me, it always seems to mess up and do something unexpected when I try to use it, so a simple adjustment becomes an ordeal of trying to fix my panels after messing them up accidentally. LXQt's way of doing it may not be as slick and modern, but it's utterly reliable.

You're shadow-banned for some reason. Maybe reach out to HN?

> When will plasma be livable in general?

It already is, and a lot of other people feel the same way. If it doesn't suit your needs, that's fine.

> every problem I've googled for (sddm most recently)

SDDM is not a part of KDE proper, but it sounds like they are going to bring it under their umbrella in Plasma 6.

Probably never. I think KDE is just too complicated at this point, with too many components and moving parts. I too very much enjoyed KDE 3: it was really performant on low-end hardware which I was using at the time, boring, and stable. But then KDE 4 happened — truly the Windows Vista moment of the Linux/FreeBSD desktop, and I ended up on a clunky setup built from separate smaller components which has been the most stable experience across all OSes (pretty much no issues or changes in my workflow in ~10 years).

AFAIK they really had to rewrite it — Qt4 was just too different from the old version, and you couldn't simply port older applications without almost doing a full rewrite anyway. Still sad it had to go, and we haven't seen anything similar since.

I am still yet to try the fork, though.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Trinity

I have TDE 14.1 compiled under Slackware 15.0 running on an old Thinkpad X60 core duo. The slackbuild is linked to from the Trinity Desktop Environment build instructions on their Web site. Seems to run fine and fastish with a TDE base build plus tde-powermanager.

I was beginning to see a degree of slowness with xfce4 4.18, probably graphics related. I like a full desktop environment with all the apps.

(I didn't use KDE back when it was version 3. I found Gnome 2 good enough)

This looks like exactly what I want. Its too bad its not packaged with FreeBSD.

As with MacOS, I find kde5/plasma5 quite habitable. I try to be my own devil's advocate about my opinions and wants, and how much those matter to moving the needle on my big goals.

I've been use KDE for a very long time, and I'm not a huge fan of Plasma, either. But at least it's possible to configure things in such a way as to avoid a lot of it.

KDE has felt a bit odd to me ever since I think v5 or whenever it was that there was a big shift in its UI design.

Some people really love it and that's great but I think many of its quirks/unique bits will be lost on general audiences. It feels designed for a particular subset of users.

I've also got a preference for LXDE, but after years of it working just fine, a few months ago I run into some weird behavior when maximizing/running full screen applications. I first tried LXQT but faced similar problems. In the end I switched to KDE plasma and it's fine again. Sometimes feel bloated, but at the same time it has some things that work out of the box or that can he configured easier compared to LXDE. Overall I'm ok with it.

> Things like the compositor crashing

I had many crashes, daily, and thought it was due to KDE but then they happened with other WMs too. Then I thought of trying to run the CPU at a lower frequency - lo and behold, no more crashes. Sucks that I can't use my laptop to its fullest power but I'm too tired to deal with the constant crashes at max CPU.

> startup scripts not running in a reproducible way

Never had this issue - all the startup scripts executed as expected.

> weird behavior around multiple monitors

The only weird behavior happened when my DE crashed where panels moved to wrong desktops (I have a three-monitor setup). Once the crashes stopped, haven't had this issue and it remembers the panel settings but on rare occasions I have seen the refresh rate of one of the monitor change from 60 to 30Hz.

> dock sticking to the wrong edges

This never happened to me but see comment above regarding panel moving to wrong desktop (even then edge orientation was retained).

> every problem I've googled for (sddm most recently)

I have suffered from this SDDM issue too - eventually swithed to lightdm and everything works.

> When will plasma be livable in general?

I think it is livable already but thats what it is - just livable and I'm not sure if I would call it highly polished / rock solid - I still find rough edges E.g. adding each widget to panels increases CPU usage by 1% or so even though I'm not adding any CPU intensive widgets; moving icons on the panel is weirdly jumpy and some icons refuse to move; I have to install plugins and weird workarounds to enable panel transparency etc. I have seen panel woes mentioned multiple times in this thread and elsewhere; I think many people would greatly appreciate a feature to export/import panel config (even the entire desktop config) so that even if your panels etc mess up (ideally not but lets be real), you can just restore from the last known good setup. This would make such a big difference to the user experience.

The cleanest and most stable of the environments I have seen was Gnome 2.12 (I think that was the version with Ubuntu Dapper Drake). Intuitive, good balance between features and cleanliness and generally got out of the way. Since Gnome 3 and its radical changes came out, I have been searching for a DE that sticks to the conventional design (no going into rabbit hole of tiling WMs for me) and errs on the side of more features/flexibility. I did dabble with Cinnamon/XFCE/Pop desktop but I always felt that there wasn't sufficient flexibility/features (direct or via extensions). I think Plasma, with all its issues, caters the best to the aforementioned needs. So KDE it is for me, until something better comes along (which given the current ecosystem, is unlikely).