Yesterday I upgraded Fedora Asahi 40 to 41 on my M1 MBA, and KDE is so bad I was reduced to laughter at its pathetic clunkiness. But then I am a documented KDE-hater ever since the days of KDE 2.0.
And GNOME, too, but at least it has the mercy of being pretty. Horribly confining and with an appalling keyboard UI, but it's pretty.
I liked KDE 1.x a lot. I didn't love it, but it was a perfectly serviceable desktop for Linux and it was FOSS. All the other usable Linux desktops I'd seen before then were paid for, such as IXI X.Desktop.
When I say I've been a KDE hater since KDE 2 I meant that I liked KDE 1, but KDE 2 was a bit of a bloated mess. KDE 3 was much much worse and it's continued to turn into a parody of a bad implementation of the Windows 98 desktop -- the bad version, with IE4 embedded in the shell -- ever since.
Yeah, desktop environments are pretty bad on Linux. Window managers are where it’s at of course. I guess it is sort of unfortunate for people if they get the impression that Linux has bad UI because somebody decided a desktop environments should be the out-of-the-box experience.
There have been good desktops. GNOME 2 was basic and clunky but usable. I actually liked and still use Unity, which is as good as it's got so far IMHO, but it's undergoing bitrot now.
Xfce is perfectly fine and I'm happy with it but it could do with some streamlining and simplification in places. The workspace switcher is a bit silly and so a good example: rows are set in one place, columns separately in a different screen. Junk the separate start menu and app finder, because the whisker menu does that. Dashboard on by default. Docklike-taskbar present by default and either set it up as a better Win10 or Win11 clone, which it can do better than the original now, or lean in to the areas where it can do things others can't and set it up as a Mac/Unity-like setup or something different that MATE, Cinnamon, etc. can't do. And slap some pretty themes on it, with visible, grabbable window margins.
But the big names are all basically in death spirals now. Aside from Elementary OS, which is very very pretty but about as flexible as an iPad (i.e. not very) the only people making real efforts at looking good and working well are in China. Deepin is gorgeous in its way, UKUI and Kylin is equally so.
Yesterday I upgraded Fedora Asahi 40 to 41 on my M1 MBA, and KDE is so bad I was reduced to laughter at its pathetic clunkiness. But then I am a documented KDE-hater ever since the days of KDE 2.0.
And GNOME, too, but at least it has the mercy of being pretty. Horribly confining and with an appalling keyboard UI, but it's pretty.