Nah, I have the same story. I spent a lot of that time distro-hopping and tried all sorts of combinations of hardware, different distributions, etc (for reasons

Nah, I have the same story. I spent a lot of that time distro-hopping and tried all sorts of combinations of hardware, different distributions, etc (for reasons unrelated to the KDE fiasco). KDE4 was extremely buggy on all of them, including the later KDE4 verions (and even earlier 5 IIRC). After reading comments like yours, I re-tried it several times (maybe 10 in total) and was always left disappointed. Maybe it's time to revisit once more (OTOH how many times do you touch the stove before learning not to do that anymore?)