Tbh, I never ventured outside of Konsole. Never felt I was missing something or was limited by performance or anything beyond what the stock Konsole offered.
I feel the same...and often, when i feel that, then maybe i'm not the target audience for said tool/app.? (Which is not bad either way, simply that as good as the tool/app. might be, its just not for me.)
I try to use KDE every year or so, and I've been doing this since KDE 1.0. It consistently keeps not delivering the experience I want. They have an uncanny ability to keep inserting "jank" everywhere, making the whole experience feel almost good but not quite.
But I'll keep trying it. Perhaps they'll get there before I die of old age.
Not sure what you mean by jank, but nothing else even comes close in my experience. Gnome feels clunky in comparison with stuff like missing server side decorations and lack of adaptive sync on top of that.
I don't doubt that people like KDE, I just cannot figure out why. Something to do with usage patterns, perhaps. I never liked the Windows 95+ style UIs, perhaps that's it. Also KDE seems to be always be riddled by display bugs that I get to experience.
I use Gnome when the desktop is irrelevant, like for instance my gaming box. Sway for when I want to optimize developer experience.
Admittedly this was fifteen years ago, but I was blown away by the developers’ inability to make any actual design decisions, instead punting literally everything to a mountain of configuration options.
Case in point, the taskbar system clock. There were no fewer than six full tabs of options to customize its behavior, including the ability to use Swatch Internet Time. Everything else bought into this philosophy too, to the point where I have to believe its users spend more time configuring it than actually doing anything useful or productive.
KDE still has this mentality, though they try to somewhat sweep it under the rug. Toolbars aren't overflowing anymore... usually. But the menus and dialogs still have those hundreds of options and it definitely gives a feeling that the developers can't commit to decisions themselves.
Really, KDE just has a maximalist philosophy. Shove everything into users' faces all at once because of all possible opinion variations.
Part of why I like GNOME is that it's the exact opposite: minimalism. The options it does offer tend to be the options you actually might want to tweak, and there's not many of them. (In the GUI anyway; GNOME still has lots of options available via dconf-editor/gsettings, basically the GNOME equivalent of the Windows Registry)
A lot of the last few years of releases has been about tweaking defaults and providing a smoother experience for first time users. This is very subjective obviously, but I find KDE Ddefaults to be a lot closer to what I like, and I appreciate having all the options be built-in as opposed to having to hunt a dozen or so random gnome shell extensions to get that last 5%.
KDE 3 and 4 were a dumpster fire. Even the first release of Plasma was very rough. But I switched to KDE maybe 5 years ago and never really looked back. If your experience with KDE is from 15 years, give it a shot with an open mind. It’s pretty great imo
Kids today will never know the awesomeness and terribleness of Swatch Internet Time. I remember when they gave a bunch of money to CNN and for a brief period the time listed on articles was Swatch Internet Time.
That aside from the tz name, it looks like regular time in a regular timezone (where you or the other person recides), so it's equally easy to confuse.
"Oh, you meant 11:00 UTC, not 11:00 Berlin time, ooops!".
Well, it's a matter of taste. But I find the latest version quite pleasant when using Krita's dark orange color scheme.
I really, really, love how much I can customise though.
I also try GNOME, Xfce, and Cinnamon every new relatively big release. And, as far as I'm concerned, really like all those projects.
I must say though, I hate how GNOME locks you in to their apps. I understand their commitment, but for instance I would appreciate if they let me choose which terminal I could launch from Nautilus.
I use KDE, but it's just a matter of preferring their development tools.
