Plasma 6 started very prone to crashes in my laptop when it released. I like how it works a lot more than Gnome, but Plasma tends to be buggier for me too.

This last month I've been having rendering issues in a lot of software, like Firefox and Okular in Fedora 41 (and now 42). I don't know where they came from as it was pretty much perfect last month.

Sometimes I think I'd prefer to return to xfce in laptop (like I tend to use in desktops) or use labwc.

I have never gotten KDE to work well... but I'm a shitty user running on shitty hardware so grain of salt and all...

Vanilla Arch is much easier to install than it used to be. Connect to wifi via terminal commands or connect ethernet, enter archinstall and go down the list.

I've only ever had the waking from sleep problem, but it's consistent in other DE's for me. I have a desktop so I just turn that and hibernate off.

I had a known problem with krunner not opening after first run unless you killed the process, but I got rofi and customized it to the teeth instead. Found out that I love rofi. I probably won't go back to krunner even it gets fixed now.

Most of those issues I do not have. By waking from suspend, do you mean hibernate? A system d update broke that last year in OpenSuse and I'm assuming other distros. I sleep now and it wakes fine.

I used to have hang on suspend resume problem on my Thinkpad E15. It somegot got resolved in later updates. Might be a random firmware problem, that's really hard to track down. So may be it mostly comes down to luck.

In my experience KDE on OpenSuse and probably Fedora are rock solid. The first and nowadays probably also the second (which has moved to first tier instead of being a sub-distribution) are considered reference implementations of industry strength distros.

My thought would be that you've added something slightly broken to the mix which breaks KDE. It can happen. Linux is complicated, KDE is also complicated, what annoys one desktop can be ok with another. If you want to figure out what the problem is, you'll have to go through your various system logs to see what fails.

Well, before wayland I always used fluxbox (eventually with picom compositor, which previously was compton). Then now on wayland I'm using sway with fuzzel, yambar and others.

I've always felt both gnome and kde, as well as most other DEs really bloated. Gnome used to be more stable on wayland, and as of Today with better support for nvidia AFAIK, but KDE is quickly catching up.

Not sure why the hate on gnome (and I guess on GTK as well). It doesn't offer all the customization by default, but you can get it through extensions while available. But on KDE one really needs to see a pletora of dependencies each time one adds a simple module or application. Both are improving gradually to become less intense on resources being KDE more advanced on that.

But hey, both are bloated compared to non full DE compositors such as sway or labwc. BTW I use sway with tabbed mode (not actually tiling) and some tweaks, and I prefer that over stacking compositors, but if wanting one labwc is pretty cool.

On X11 there's a huge amount of window managers plus compositors plus several other applications which altogether can give a similar sense to a DE but way less intense on resources, and for sure way less bloated. To me DEs are overrated to answer your title, but perhaps that's just me, :)

Yes, that's what its always done.

Xfce user, here to represent!

I love it and haven't had any trouble. Try it out!

I use arch and so I get the latest kde releases and sometimes things are buggy. But usually those are fixed next update. But yes, it is beautiful but man it's not as stable as something like gnome

It has many preloaded features. You will use only a few of them.

I've been using Fedora KDE for...months? Maybe a year now? And I've yet to see it hang or crash.

I don't like it, too much desk space wasted on useless crapola. I use Mate, a nice clean desktop with a simple pull-down menu leaving the majority of the space free for work.