A lot of the last few years of releases has been about tweaking defaults and providing a smoother experience for first time users. This is very subjective obvio

A lot of the last few years of releases has been about tweaking defaults and providing a smoother experience for first time users. This is very subjective obviously, but I find KDE Ddefaults to be a lot closer to what I like, and I appreciate having all the options be built-in as opposed to having to hunt a dozen or so random gnome shell extensions to get that last 5%. KDE 3 and 4 were a dumpster fire. Even the first release of Plasma was very rough. But I switched to KDE maybe 5 years ago and never really looked back. If your experience with KDE is from 15 years, give it a shot with an open mind. It’s pretty great imo