the appeal is that it's the only non blatant osx rip off de that receives active development and has a large enough userbase that all the little issues and kinks should be worked out

if you like gnome and can stomach its defaults while putting up with the bullshit of gtk then kde was never meant to appeal to you, but if you've tried xfce, lxde, lxqt, mate, etc, and found their support or deveopment lacking, then kde is the only alternative if you still want a full desktop environment and haven't already bailed ship for a tiling wm or a simple window manager + panel or something

>>53875246
KDE is kind of shit meme look by default, but it's really nice once you customize it. The screen edges feature is one of the best things about it.

Main appeal as I see it is lots of configuration options available without the need to mess around to get at them.

Sadly, despite that I find it a lot harder to configure KDE to my liking than GNOME. With KDE, I spent the occasional time tweaking here and there for weeks, without ever really becoming comfortable. With GNOME, I committed twenty minutes to it and ended up with an environment that felt really nice to use. Worth noting on top of that is that if I was restricted to the defaults, I'd prefer KDE.

Granted, I haven't tried KDE5 yet. I don't feel like committing to installing it on my system, but mayhap I ought to try it in a VM at least.

reminder that Yosemite is obviously inspired by KDE yet people claim that it looks good

>>53875246
Omg it looks like a shitty Mac OS theme

The appeal of KDE is you are completely free to adapt a feature rich, beatiful and modern DE to YOUR needs and preferences, instead of "this is what you get" philosophy.

In Windows and GNOME/Unity I feel like devs are saying this to me: "-Don't touch it, retard user." KDE respects my freedom and my intelligence.

>bloated

The bloated meme needs to die already. KDE is not bloated, you can install a plasma5-minimal on arch and boot your pc with 400MB of ram. The only "bloat" is all the akonadi/pim bullshit almost nobody uses and all the distros shipping it. But kf5 is modular and you can delete/disable it easily, not like the old monolithic KDE4.

>>53878079
>boot your pc with 400MB of ram
I got so used to XFCE and openbox (80 MB on boot) that this looks like bloat BUT then I remember how much RAM Windows eats at boot so this is actually solid. Is KDE stable or still crashes often?

>>53878652
Xfce and openbox with 80 MB is a lie. I'm speaking of the entire system, not only kde processes. Also people don't seem to undestand the definition of bloat. Is not bloat if for those x3 more ram you get x3 more rich and useful features.

>Is KDE stable or still crashes often
Using plasma 5.6 and doing great.

>>53875246
I don't really like KDE but Kwin is actually pretty fucking good

KDE is too big to talk about all the parts.

Lets just focus on the window manager, kwin.
It has a builtin compositor which means it uses more memory than a minimal window manager. But it will feel a lot faster as it has hardware acceleration and animations so things feel smooth.
If you want to extend the functionality, you can write a kwin script, but you can share and download scripts from other people with a easy online integration where it just pulls the script for you if you don't know how to do that.
But if you don't do that, you can search through the features in the hotkey settings where you can view and change hotkeys.
When you change a hotkey you will get a notification if there is a conflict and you can remove the other hotkey or cancel your change.
When you want to make some special rules for a window, you can either click on an application to fetch the correct settings or you can do it from the window itself.
The things you can change is pretty cool too.
You can select where the window should be, if it should have a title bar or not, if it should be selectable from the application switcher etc.

A nice example would be if you do a lot of video calls, you might want the window to be on all desktops, in the corner, over all windows, not on the list of windows you alt-tab to and without a title bar.

Oh and krunner... Krunner is the best.
alt+f2 and you can launch applications, get to a calculator and find files... Better than anything I have seen on other desktops.

>>53875818
That's the one thing I miss from KDE.

>>53880100
>alt+f2

alt+space bar

>>53880411
they changed it? disregard my post then. I hate everything about those fuckers now.

>>53880503
Yes. But you can configure your global shortcuts. It's KDE, faggot. Learn to use your pc, don't be a gnome3 user.

>>53880628
I was using a form of deception called sarcasm.
It is often used when humans interact as a humorous response.