always seems to bog down and break within a month

Counterpoint: KDE is literally the best to ever do it and none even compare
- do what? look good while it chokes on itself? because i'd say unity did that even better.
  
  Be the most versatile and usable DE with the best applications
  Also works on my machine (14 year old thinkpad)

No I think KDE is the best de out there fight me.
- Same

Never had a problem with KDE. Are you sure you aren’t using KDE 4.0?
- i've had problems with every version i've installed on every distro i've installed it on since the mid '00s when i started using linux

Man, I don't understand this sentiment at all. I don't know what would be different from my setups, but KDE has always been rock solid for me. Back when I used it on Mandrake Linux and today.
OP, might you be an Arch user?
- I'm using KDE on Arch, no problems here.
  
  KDE on Arch + Nvidia Wayland was a buggy experience for me a few months ago. But honestly, even X11 on Intel integrated graphics gets a few buggy releases every couple months.
  I still love KDE though. Way better than MacOS
- i usually stick to debian flavors, i haven't had good experiences with arch

I'm sorry, but KDE apps are literally the ugliest things on the planet. I really like how many features KDE has, but I just can't switch due to the looks
- I like how the KDE apps look on the plasma desktop. I hate how they look everywhere else.
- qt allows for theming
- Yeah, I never got into it; the look just doesn't work for me, even with theming.

Hard disagree. My desktop is as stable as it's pretty and I find it really good that both me and a friend of mine that uses KDE have very different workflows that KDE is able to adapt to. I am quite the fanboy of KDE tbh. It never failed me and is s dream to use everytime I turn on my PC
- see i hear things like this but when i install it's basically the same resource-hungry unstable mess as it was the first time i checked it out over a decade ago. i figured maybe it's me and tried some distros that come with it preinstalled and it's not any different. are you running a supercomputer or what?
  
  I am running it on a modern laptop the distro is nobara

I was running xfce for a while on my old laptop with only 8 GB of ram. Thinking that it was the least resource usage DE. (Which i think it still is but i havent tested in a bit).
Then i got a new pc and tried kde and to my amazment it used just a tiny bit more resources than xfce did on my old laptop. I then installed kde on that old pc and it ran perfectly well. kde had a lot more QOL compared to xfce in my opionion, with none of the jank.
Its intersting how much different our experiences are.
What would you recomend for a DE?

KDE is buttery smooth (165Hz, no stutters ever) for me and kwin is a much nicer compositor than mutter.

I always hear about people saying KDE breaks too easily. I've literally used it for years and I've never had serious issues outside of the Plasma 6 Beta for obv reasons. Like what are y'all doing to your DE?
- Being on a rolling release I get a similar feeling, it just works and any noticeable bugs gets fixed pretty shortly
  even upgrading to KDE 6 was hilariously smooth, almost scary
  I think most issues with KDE are from fixed point release distros which just don't bother with backporting minor bug fixes
- literally using the point and click interface to customize the layout and run programs normally

it's something I've been pointing out for almost half a decade now, the main problem with KDE isn't any of the bugs, it's the lack of vision of what the project wants to be
it ends up being a mix of windows with now GNOME's design due to it never being able to say no when people want "more features and more preferences"
- It wants to be feature rich, configurable, and flexible
  GNOME already has the Apple "we know better than you so it's our way or the highway" design strategy down to an art
  
  it's a project with a cohesive idea of what it wants to build, to a certain extent they are perfectly right to stand with "their way or the highway"
  this isn't an apple thing, it's just that in the operating system market there isn't any other example of someone having a defined idea of what they want to build
  KDE tries to be all of those things, but trying to cast too wide of a net just gets you a mess of settings and unfortunately buggy experience overall
  small edit: I have a ton of respect for the KDE devs, I just realized I've been sounding too negative about them, I just don't like the end product
- it's been the same buggy mess for as long as i've been using linux, always with the promise that the next update will take it from "neat tech demo" to "suitable permenant DE", i'm just really confused why it's the hot shit right now because my experience with the current release was literally identical to the first time i tried it way, way back on maverick meerkat. if i didn't know any better i'd say they changed the version number and nothing else.
  
  Does that mean you're on Kubuntu? Which would mean you haven't even tried Plasma 6 yet right?
  Honestly Plasma is moving so fast it feels like the experience would unironically be better on something like Arch or Fedora where you get new updates almost instantaneously. Anyway, I'm on Fedora and Plasma is pretty stable for me, especially since Plasma 6. Some minor annoyances I encountered are also getting fixed in 6.1.

6.1 promises to fix some of that jank. I'm a few changes away from switching over.
- been waiting over a decade, still janky. don't hold your breath.

Sounds like a you problem, aka skill issue.
- idk man, when the distro has kde out of the box and it's still a dumpster fire from the first boot idk how that's on me

Ah, a bleeding edge user who mistakes "nightly" with "stable.
Anti Commercial-AI license
- nice assumption. i'm a brokeass who typically runs hand-me-down hardware, stable all day.
  also that copyright license is hilarious, you know it's the neckbeard equivalent of posting "i do not consent to my data being collected" as your fb status right? or are you going to take a giant company to court for copying your nerd insult from lemmy?
- That is not a KDE issue.
  
  desktop edit mode is so fun though

I look at the KDE UI guidelines and then I look at Gnome and I wonder what went wrong with Gnome.
- now it's my turn to go "yeah it's ugly as sin but i've never had a single issue with it".

Used to crash a lot for me prior to 5.24 on Wayland, but now on 6.0 I’m dailing it. Full screen tearing works on Wayland as well so it’s suitable for gaming now

Valve should have used GNOME on SteamOS so I could actually use it with the touch screen, and no on can convince me otherwise
- GTK4 has issues with some touch screens that causes the UI to lock up until the user pushes esc. No idea why.
- Did their old Steam Machine not use Gnome? (Or was it just Debian that it was based on?)
  
  SteamOS used to use GNOME, but now it uses KDE.

It's the definition of "customization for customizations sake". It's ok if you like that, just not for me

KDE X11 is also quite janky for me. KDE with Wayland is pretty smooth. I'm using Fedora 40 btw so no idea if that is because Wayland is the new default when using the KDE spin.

KDE has always been buggy for me, switching to AMD makes it a lot more usable but still too annoying, last time I tried KDE, all the panel widgets refused to load and deleting my panel and making a new default panel did nothing to solve this.
I'm on NixOS.

I love how it works, I hate how careless they handle user data. I don't trust kdewallet because it forgot my wifi passwords multiple times, suddenly demanded a password for a passwordless wallet, or lost the wallet alltogether. I lost tons of old emails when kmail switched to akonadi storage instead of plain mail folders. And why did they change my desktop background after an update? Can't they just respect my settings and stuff a little bit -.-

if kde systemmonitor (the Plasma 6 replacement for ksysguard) would stop crashing every 5 seconds and become aware of which UI layer the thimg i'm dragging is on i would appreciate it

KDE was always the bleeding edge side. I always stuck with Gnome in the past for stability.
- KDE feels like it's stuck in 2007 trying to be like vista

Honestly, I'm using Cinnamon, it has all the stability and practicality of old style gnome with the eyecandy of KDE. However I also use MATE and XFCE if I wanna be frugal on resources.

Yes, it's a little bit beautiful and a little bit overrated

Well yes, it's ugly as hell but fairly stable and not really overrated.

Found Nvidia user
- integrated intel graphics, actually. some people are poor you know. though back in the day when i had a 390 it failed to impress then as well. what a weird association to make.

KDE is a club/association by the way.....
- nobody likes a pedant
  
  Given, you are talking about the OS UI Plasma... It's very customizable. You can make it look like whatever you want... Like MacOs, like Windows 10, 11, etc....