I used to have these problems, but since about 2013 I've just had the same Arch install with Plasma on my desktop and notebook and they have just worked. Update

I used to have these problems, but since about 2013 I've just had the same Arch install with Plasma on my desktop and notebook and they have just worked. Update once a week, watch the mailing list for breakage notifications (about once a quarter) and have a boring desktop experience while I get work done. Along the way, my GPU (290) got much faster on the Mesa driver, the kernel has developed new features, btrfs has been stable as hell for me for years, and if I ever need anything I just yaourt it and its there. Since you used KDE as an example, maybe you switched too soon. A lot of people did. The recent Plasma 5 release was exactly like the KDE 4 release - it took a good 5 - 6 major releases before stability and feature parity with the predecessor were reached. But if you switched from KDE 3 to 4.5, or from 4 to 5.6, the new desktop worked fine. Were on Plasma 5.9 now and its boring. In a good way. It is stable, it works, the features are great, the looks are excellent, it gets out of my way and I can get work done on it very well. Linux is boring. And thats a good thing. I can easily buy a system76 / Dell computer that runs Ubuntu, install whatever I want on it, and have a crisp experience without issue now, unless I go looking for trouble on the bleeding edge of hardware or software.