Correction: their efforts _used to be_ excellent, and I've been a big fan since KDE2. But lately, the whole plasma desktop feels like it will topple over and fall if I so much as look at it funny.

Random crashes of random "ksomething" components, announced with a cheerful dialog with a cute icon (I've had these crashes upon a first login of a newly created user, how low is that?), the little activity chooser widget expanding and collapsing itself in top-right corner over and over, audio devices appearing and disappearing semi-randomly whenever KDE tries to play one of its sound effects, Just a few days ago, after upgrade to latest plasma, all my systray icons are double in size, and thus no longer neatly in two rows. I'm not a half-blind grandpa, or a smartphone user, I don't need icons the size of my thumbs! The systray widget _is_ still able to display smaller icons, when I make the panel narrower, but the only way I can get two rows of icons anymore is to make it so wide that two rows of these large icons can fit.

Just yesterday, I tried creating a new user account with the intent of starting out with a fresh configuration and recreating my customizations, to get rid of old cruft (KDE doesn't seem to handle upgrades from previous versions very well, e.g. I lost the right-click menu on empty desktop somewhere around plasma 5.4). I got crash on first start, text in various systemsettings sections not redrawing properly when scrolling, "desktop settings" menu item always produces two (!) dialogs side by side, probably because I have two monitors active, KDE sometimes starting into a black screen with no controls visible... Not a very good first impression for a new user.

I'm now suffering KDE until I can get something else going and configured to my workflow. LXQt is something I'm looking at primarily, since I like the idea, and also like to write code for Qt. Hopefully I'll even be able to contribute eventually.

But yeah - KDE is circling the drain from a regular desktop user's point of view. Although it's still usable, it's the thousand little cuts that will get you.

Those have always been a big turnoff for me, too. On top of that, I've never liked KDE's UI design; parts of it come off as overcrowded while others have oddly distributed whitespace and the lack of flowing lines and symmetry in its control layout give a chaotic feel. From this perspective, I feel the gnome guys are doing a much better job even if they comically oversize many UI elements.