When are people going to learn to stop making extensions for Gnome? This is nothing new. If you want a desktop environment you can modify, Gnome isn't it. The designers have made this clear over and over for about 15 years now.
When I first tried KDE, it was during the Plasma 4 days and ran as slow as molasses (not to mention the constant crashing leaving me with a black screen). Friends convinced me about a decade later to try Plasma 5: it is no longer a slow, buggy experience, they claimed. Well, I set up Debian 10 with Plasma 5 and changing the default KDE cursor to the black Adwaita cursor already didn't work! Depending on which window my cursor was hovering, it would change between my custom cursor and the default KDE cursor. This was after applying settings and restarting KDE. And forget any modifications you make if you use SDDM, it always seems to use defaults.
The comprehensiveness of Adwaita as an icon set and the relative stability of GNOME is what keeps me on GNOME. If I had to ditch GNOME, I would probably choose MATE or Xfce next. I've been fooled too many times by KDE evangelists claiming everything's fine and rosey nowadays and we are totally no longer in the Plasma 4 days.
Zero bullshit. Zero bloat. Works great with everything. Nothing breaks. Simple, easy, customisation.
(Speaking with love as an i3/Sway person.)
Sorry, just wanted to test-drive KDE without wiping my entire system. My friend even had this problem on KDE Neon.
Is it possible that ksplashqml was really present, and actually the "not found" error was because ksplashqml could not find a custom splash theme file? Had you installed and removed any custom themes?
Agreed. GNOME has a much more original approach, and doesn't have those weird window action buttons. I got confused when I first seen them.
If you not like that, you can change it. I have setup KDE to look like a hybrid of OSX and Unity (menu bar, lateral taskbar, maximised windows have the window buttons integrated on the panel and the maximised window become borderless, etc).
Early KDE 4 versions was a mess. Latter KDE 4 versions was more stable that Gnome. I saw it when Gnome 3 was unusable on a Radeon GPU (back, when ATI/AMD gpu drivers was proprietary and a piece of shit), when KDE 4 was just working without issues.
Sway WM, Waybar, Rofi. Rock solid, and does everything I've ever needed from it and is still a better experience on a multi-monitor setup than any DE I've tried.
People like simplicity, and are often very willing to trade a lot for it. See why "It just works" was such a powerful advertising slogan