I spent a few minutes setting up a Plasma desktop to resemble what I like about GNOME Shell. A screenshot doesn’t do it justice imho. Application Dashboard on Meta, Overview on Meta-W, a Panel and Icons-Only Task Manager set to Autohide at the bottom of each screen, and the Tiling Manager.
As much as I love a good light weight DE like XFCE, KDE plasma has been the best experience on multiple distros including Debian and Arch. It’s the closest thing to an accessible windows-like experience with all the customization you wish you had in windows with so many applets and widgets that fill in so many gaps in other DEs.
KDE isn’t much heavier than XFCE. On a modern computer, the difference is indiscernible.
No need for anything particularly modern. Even on a ten year old laptop I’ve not noticed a difference (Windows, on the other hand, barely runs at all on that machine).
My computers are pretty new. It’s the small things that really eat at you though.
Glad I switched even with the teething pains with Nvidia and wayland. I can always fallback on x11 until the bug is squashed. Always new little problems popping up like Nvidia isn’t really tested well on the Wayland side.