I like KDE, just not the defaults which I think are horrific. I had my fair share of ricing linux in general, and have done my rounds through all kinds of window manager and desktop environments and theming engines and desktop effects.

Unfortunately, what I found was once you added plugins and themes and this and that, there was too many breaking changes when considering the whole UI system. This is not really a technical fault of KDE devs themselves, but it turned into something akin to managing a node.js project. Yes I know it you use less plugins it's better, but I want both: plugins as well as pixel perfect consistency.

I found similar issues in gnome, where it's even worse since the DE itself pushes tons of breaking changes. Note that I consider even a settings menu reorg as a breaking change.

I finally settled on XFCE, where for years now, nothing has changed. Not even one pixel. The menus are the same, the search results come in the same order so I have muscle memory like "<text> arrowkey arrowkey enter".

That's my expectation from a DE. I basically have the entire desktop byheart. And this culture seems to extend to the plugins as well, for example the various xfce4-panel plugins I use have all been pixel-perfect equal for years now. My themes and what not have never broken on me either.

Windows up until 10 also had similar properties, I had a crap ton of plugins with rainmeter, 10k+ LOC AHK scripts, etc, and nothing ever broke.

I also like that the shared library disease isn't that high in XFCE-land, in KDE installing something needed too many common k-* packages. I understand KDE gives a whole suite of apps so it might be necessary, but this also meant that I cannot use KDE apps even the ones I liked, on another DE without also getting... kwallet or something iirc.

The thing I miss the most from KDE is wobbly windows. I would kill for that feature, but unfortunately, I don't think I would tolerate breaking changes for that feature.