It took three desktops to realize what I want.

XDA Developers

A personal account of switching Linux desktop environments from GNOME to COSMIC to KDE Plasma. COSMIC was praised for its tiling system but let down by an immature app ecosystem where non-native GTK apps felt out of place. KDE Plasma won out due to its polished out-of-the-box experience, deep configurability, and features like Krunner that became indispensable. GNOME's intentional minimalism eventually felt too restrictive, while KDE struck the right balance for a power user who wants control without chaos.

I left GNOME for COSMIC, tried KDE next, and only one felt right in the end

COSMIC is great for a certain type of user

Former long-term Plasma user here. I’ve used Plasma since the earl-ish days of 4.1 through so many headaches and bugs. Despite all of the problems I faced and several system upgrades to offset the heavy resource requirements, I had a strong preference for KDE. Often, I went through the multi-hour process of stripping out whatever default DE I had with a fresh distro installation just to switch. Since the big switch from Plasma 5.27 to 6+, Plasma has shown a higher level of refinement, polish, and customization compared to just about any other DE. It’s more apparent why KDE is becoming the default desktop for many distros as time goes on.
Despite my long-term use of KDE, I have actually moved onto tiling window managers, starting with Hyprland for over a year, and I’m now on Niri. My main goal for the change away from KDE was my unhealthy obsession with desktop widgets, a leftover habit from my time with Windows where I used Rainmeter and RocketDock on every computer. While my resource usage hasn’t decreased by much, the fewer distractions has helped with my productivity.

Been like this for me for a decade at least. On the positive side, when I first decided to make KDE Plasma my favorite DE on Debian-based linux distros, it was too “heavy” (on resources) to solicit many distro authors/teams from making it their default DE (despite a few including Plasma as an alternate option via the linux install and a tested integration with tasksel) but that’s all changing now… for example, I can finally have Ubuntu Studio as my daily driver since they switched to Plasma sometime this past year (previous incantations consisted of, like many other performant distros, the XFCE DE as default for the past decade or so). Its nice to have hardware that supports the bells-n-whistles while still maintaining intrinsic performance in specific distros (like audio recording/production, etc).