What KDE needs isn't new features but less bugs.
I like the concept, but I guess maintaining it is no easy task, and people is more motivated to add things than fix them.
In the end, I gave up, went to window managers instead to full DEs, then to i3, and now am on a Mac.
Still, I remember 3.5 fondly. The last good Linux Desktop Environment (Gnome tried so hard, but always was a bit too 'our way or the highway' when KDE allowed for some customization)
There are still bugs but they do seem to be ironing them out, they go in the right direction.
The only big bugs I notice these days are the occasionnal plasmashell crashes but it comes back on its own. KWin doesn't crash and that's fortunate because on Wayland, that would bring down non KDE apps.
I exclusively use plasma, I'm quite sensitive to instabilities, it's not an issue for me with KDE.
I did avoid the first years of KDE 4 and was using GNOME at that time.
Have you tried Trinity?
I don't think it's people holding a grudge, I think it's people who got burned and are hesitant to touch that burner again because they don't want to get burned twice.
I don't want to invest migration of workflows and time to understand a new UI paradigm for a system that once catastrophically crashed and burned something good on the altar of 'new and innovative and unfinished'.
That's not a grudge. It's growing older and setting other priorities in life.
I find it a lot more sensible than windows especially because the latter started embedding ads and "helpful suggestions" everywhere in the UI.
I think it was the closest we ever came to a 'Linux on the Desktop' year for a mass market.
A trivial example: keeping a working weather widget on my taskbar for an update cycle without breaking it was too much to ask for Gnome. I put up with this kind of thing for YEARS before switching to Plasma. Widgets for your taskbar and stable plug-in APIs should be table stakes for a desktop environment, especially if its whole philosophy is one that the core product should be minimal and most functionality should be in plugins.
You know what KDE has? Features. You know what it doesn't have a lot of? Bugs. Maybe you've tried it four times over the years but after a short trial three years ago I've been using exclusively Plasma.
It's way better than Gnome at this point, and I say this as a Gnome 2.x user. I laughed at KDE 4 back in the day.
But I'm pretty sure everyone in this thread who is bitching about Plasma has not used it in recent times. It's an absolutely fantastic, solid, polished, featureful desktop. To say otherwise is just to display your ignorance, frankly.
My last time using kde was a few months ago, and it was stability issues (which could be hardware related), but also cumbersome customization of main UI, and minor annoying bugs, that keep accumulating through usage.
Don't get me wrong, I love KDE concept and I don't think Gnome is making great decisions keeping it minimalist (I use i3 for that reason. If I want a DE I want it fully featured and customizable).
I'm just sharing my personal view and agreeing with another user. I know what users can think about fabulous software, and that they (we) are biased in many many ways.
On the other side, KDE consists of almost exclusively native (C++) code, although I believe some tools are written in Python. Great for performance, but C++ has a reputation for a reason.
For what it's worth, the last major release has been very stable. It has also always been stable for me on my Steam Deck. I have a feeling KDE's issues are similar to WordPress': external plugins hooking deep into the native API, making it seem like the software they're integrating with is unstable.
For me, KDE is a better concept than Gnome, and I genuinely don't know which is better developed/mantained. But it is true that I always change after a week or so, and I've been a gnome user for longer periods of time.
I'll keep testing it, more so if I install updated hardware in my computer