I tried KDE over a decade ago before using Mint for a while. Then I saw someone's laptop running vanilla GNOME and thought it looked nice. But a couple of years ago I realised that GNOME's insistence on hiding settings in "tweaks"/gsettings and generally making it harder to do what I wanted was getting in the way. KDE still has the configurability that I loved when I first started using Linux and GNOME 2, without being an infinite config hellhole like the niche WMs