I don't have historic use of kde but I switched to it about a year ago, after a big release, and its been awesome. Very stable for me, allows custom dpi's for each of my monitors, it doesn't break itself like gnome does. I haven't bothered with other DE's since I tried it, not even xfce (old favourite of mine for tablet & low spec pc), kde performs even well on low specs. And highly configurable out of the box. Its the most stable DE I've encountered for daily driving so far.

What was so much better in the old days (besides memory consumption)?

All KDE before 5 is buggy, slow, unstable, ugly, and generally unpleasant to use.

I remember running KDE3 and it consumed too much ram for too little stability. Much worse desktop experience than today.

> All KDE after 2 and 3 is awful to use.

Thank you for saying this! I agree. KDE 1.x was great. KDE 2.x was cluttered but it did the job; with a major rework, such as Corel LinuxOS and Xandros gave it, it was a good desktop.

https://www.linux.org.ru/images/9832/original.png

Xandros never managed to tame KDE 3. It released a tech preview, with a basically unmodified copy of KDE 3, and then stopped putting out new versions of the desktop OS.

KDE is the poster child for creeping featuritis: it has dozens and dozens of skins and app launchers and other relatively pointless chrome that does not extend its functionality.

And yet, over the major releases from 4 to 5 to 6, it has gradually lost useful features, such as tabbed title bars and window grouping; title bars on the side of windows (like in wm2 and wmx), or on the bottom; and panels that could span screens.

20 years ago, there was a parody of KDE versus GNOME:

https://koplowicz.com/content/kde-vs-gnome-2

Now, it feels to me like the roles are reversed.

> I remember running KDE 1 running flawlessly on 32mb of RAM having a better desktop experience than today...

Also agreed.