The ancient Windows desktops were quite good so if something tried to emulate them that would be a reasonable goal.

I have no idea how modern KDE is, because I abandoned KDE due to the KDE 4 disaster. Nonetheless, KDE 3.5 was much better than Windows XP, even if its default configuration was somewhat similar.

Actually I consider KDE 3.5 the best desktop environment that I have ever seen, much better not only than the contemporaneous Windows XP, but also than the contemporaneous Mac OS X. The reason was that KDE 3.5 had an extreme customizability, so everyone could reconfigure it according to their tastes, so it no longer resembled any other desktop environment. Unfortunately, almost everything that I liked in KDE 3.5 was removed in KDE 4 and replaced with rigid choices that I disliked.

After KDE 4, I never had the courage to try KDE again (I fled to the refuge of XFCE), but I hope that it has recovered and now it is at least at the level of its past glory, if not better.

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bityard 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

KDE finally got back to its 3.x level of quality a few years back, towards the middle of the 5.x releases. They are now on 6.x.

I highly recommend giving it another try, I'm super picky and modern KDE simply delivers the best and most flexible desktop experience, bar none.

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pimeys 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yep. I used KDE from the early betas until KDE 4 and escaped at that point to the i3/sway world.

KDE 6 is really good tho. It's so fast, works great, Dolphin is the absolute best file manager there is...

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blooalien 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> ... because I abandoned KDE due to the KDE 4 disaster.

I totally hated that whole mess. It almost ruined KDE for me. The real disaster there wasn't that KDE released v4 prematurely, but that they didn't make it crystal clear to the distro maintainers (and end-users) that it was not ready for "prime time" use yet (it was basically "pre-release"/alpha quality), and the major distros of the time jumped on making it the default (forced it on everyone) when it was still basically utterly broken compared to the prior versions of KDE (which had become overall quite solid and reliable by that point).

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toyg an hour ago | parent [-]

It's all post-hoc rationalisation. They got caught in their own hype and released low-quality code. They fucked up, that's all, and it's a bit embarrassing that they won't admit it.

	▲	pimeys 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		But also they built on it, and KDE 6 benefits from all that work and is an exceptional desktop.