I abandoned KDE during the KDE-3 (edit: to 4) migration apocalypse, when nothing worked as it did before, or at all, and everything looked like it needed at least another year of refinement.
Is this settled and past now? Is KDE still adament on making virtually every other pixel configurable?
KDE 3 was rock solid. They did break a lot of stuff when releasing KDE 4. That was very unstable / crashy. At that time I moved to Gnome 2, and moved back when Unity was shipped by default in Ubuntu. The late KDE 4.X releases were rock solid. I didn't like KDE 5 at first. A lot of things felt unfinished / not ready. but KDE 5 has been rock solid for years now, and from what I understand they have promised they would make more incremental changes from now on (so no more KDE 4.0-like disruptions). They are currently focusing on ironing out the small things instead of breaking stuff every month.
Now the world seems more mature: Cinnamon, KDE and The Ubuntu favor of Gnome seem to work very well (Each time I see Ubuntu Gnome I think "wow, that looks good!"). Xfce have been rock stable and reliable for years and years for people who like it. Still looks the same as when I discovered it 17 years ago. I've heard people like the current versions of Gnome and that the latest versions are better.
And yes of course everything is still highly customizable in KDE. There are people who make it look like old Windows, some who make it look like Mac and both work quite well. But you are not forced to customize, the default are top notch and that's what I use. They've been working on the settings center which was a mess and which is still not perfect, but it's gone to the point where it is one of the best I've seen. In comparison, the Windows' several setting centers are a huge mess and the Gnome settings are lacking, and you need to install Gnome Tweaks to have some useful stuff and now you have two settings panels.
I used KDE 4 from the first alpha versions (~2007) and never quit using it. However, I had friends who didn't like the mess that KDE 4 was in the beginning and who were very verbose about the good KDE 3 features they were missing and the new behavior they didn't like.
However, at some point they saw that the very few things they were still missing were neglectable compared to the good things that KDE 4 brought with it.
Nevertheless, 2007 to 2012 were 5 years during which it wasn't easy to be a KDE user ;-)
I abandoned KDE during the KDE-3 (edit: to 4) migration apocalypse, when nothing worked as it did before, or at all, and everything looked like it needed at least another year of refinement.
Is this settled and past now? Is KDE still adament on making virtually every other pixel configurable?