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.
I don't want this topic to devolve into a Linux distro war, but over the years I've noticed KDE seems to run better on distributions that prefer as-is upstream code. Debian is not one of those, so for the particular use case of running KDE, I would choose a different system.
What core feature exactly is it missing? Of course, it is a completely different featureset when compared to a tiling window manager, and Ive used those as well - they really do give you superpowers, I just outgrew TWMs if I may say so.
Last time I used KDE, it couldn't find `ksplashqml`, and had to reinstall the OS (didn't know what TTY was at the time). It also frequently crashed three times, and counting. GNOME is minimal and out of my way. The only space GNOME Shell takes up is the top bar. Nothing more, nothing less. Not to mention the off-brand Hot Corner.
I believe you had a bad experience, but i would suggest the blame lays on your package maintainer - in debian (and ubuntu), ksplashqml should be part of the plasma-workspace package, which you can't avoid. What distro were you using?
Feel free to stop replying at any point since I can't really help, but I can't see a reason why /usr/bin/ksplashqml itself would have gone missing.
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?
No wonder you had a poor experience. Distros that don't treat KDE as a first-class DE are well-known to have a generally poor KDE experience. Kubuntu is probably the worst KDE-focused distro, and you didn't even start with Kubuntu as a base.
A slightly poorer experience for a distro's non-flagship DE is one thing, a major binary being outright missing is another. This should have still worked - Ubuntu does support adding KDE by installing that package, kubuntu-desktop depends on plasma-workspace which contains /usr/bin/ksplashqml.
KDE is ugly and buggy. None of its famed customization works particularly well. I couldn’t find a way to change the font size on the panel, which is trivial with Dash to Panel on gnome. Latte dock would completely freak out when trying to move it and cause a bunch of visual artifacts. Crashes when installing themes. The “overview” feature inspired by gnome that has completely unnatural animations and doesn’t allow anything to be dragged, even worse then the one on MacOS. And the fact that they still default to server side decorations. If you surveyed non-Linux users after trying both desktop environments I’d bet next to none of them would choose KDE, especially if you allow extensions on gnome.
KDE is too much Windowsy for my taste. Aesthetics are not that great either. In Gnome land, there are no extensions that I cannot live without. Sure, they'll be in a broken state for a while after a new release. And also, I'm totally hooked with Gnome workflow. There is a keyboard shortcut for almost any action.
You've been posting tons of unsubstantive and flamebait comments lately. If you keep this up, we'll have to ban you. We've already had to warn you about this many times before. Not cool.
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).
The thing is I don't want to spend hours and hours to customize the thing. And, those customizations often have undesirable side effects (like degraded performance, messed up app themes, issues after updates, etc). In Gnome I use stock Gnome with a couple of extensions and that's about it.
Yes, I have a KDE desktop since years, and there are no breaking changes. It's a stable desktop. KDE4 was a mess, but KDE5 runs really nice. There are still KDEisms, some things don't work as intended, e.g. I don't understand how icon themes work on KDE (can't get rid of some 2-color uglies), but overall I'm really happy with it.
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.
I hate whenever people use the argument "Who even needs <product> when you can <hack together 5 different products after you've done a bunch of research>"
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
I am an avid fan of the i3 way of managing windows but I unfortunately encountered some serious bugs last time I tried Sway. I have used it in the past and even contributed a few patches but it seems that for many people's use cases it is not mature enough yet.
Right, and as soon as 45 is the official version and 44 is deprecated, you won't have any extensions. That's not what I consider a stable DE, unless you're one of the many people here who apparently simply don't use extensions at all and like the out-of-the-box experience. (And if you're one of those people, that's fine, but the whole issue here is customizability so this discussion doesn't apply to you. It's like joining a discussion about the challenges of being a minority and then saying "well I'm not a minority so I don't have these problems! You should be more like me!")
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.