The negativity in this thread is fascinating and shows just how different expectations from users can be. I've been a KDE user since installing Fedora on a lark right when KDE4 "left beta" which, if the developers were being honest, was much closer to an alpha. It was painful, but KDE today is very feature rich and relatively low resource.

I use KDE on a very old thinkpad and it is fantastic, I really enjoy the experience. KRunner is my primary way of interacting with the DE and combined with the recent touchpad gesture support is a very clean way of navigating what a DE should provide a user. I've been using plasma wayland for the last two years and in the last year has become more 'clean' (smoother animations, no tearing, stable) than X11 ever was. I get ~9 hours of battery on an X1 Nano Gen2 using the most recent Firefox and various terminal applications.

Every six months or so I try other DEs, gnome, budgie, the plethora of tiling managers, etc et al. None of them are as nice to use as KDE. KDE specifics aside, as always, Linux on the desktop is more polished than ever. Is it as polished as Windows/MacOS? Probably not but I don't really care. Maybe it is finally the year of the Linux desktop? Using any of these modern GUIs, ZFS, and the impressive new 8+ core CPUs available from AMD/Intel with 32Gb+ of RAM and NVME SSD makes it seem like local computing has become what I always wanted it to be. I now store and process my data in RAM. It's incredible how fast laptop compute is.

BTW. Latte dock is very stable now as well, and is a great addition to KDE if you haven't tried it. Obligatory scrot...

https://i.imgur.com/RG8ZJ3x.png

PostScript: After the monetization of imgur it's worse than ever. What are HN folks using for image hosting now?