And All This Time, I have Never Once Discovered What 'Plasma' Means...
Used KDE practically all my Linux Life.
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Still think it the best --- and more so when they once more have separate wallpapers for each Virtual Desktop as in the old days --- but the frequent modernizing fugly flattish changes continue to repel. For some reason they think change is good even if it diminishes the experience.
Just as I have made Pale Moon the aspect of Firefox 2012 -- Fx lost me when they went to Australis, and before that I swore by Fx --- my PCLinux, up to date this very afternoon, strictly duplicates 2012 as well. I DON'T want modern. If it were reversed and all these new looks were the old looks, then I would want to change to the look I prefer, because it's not just about the shock of the new, but because of the aesthetics. All these relentless changes never come with any choice of rejecting those aspects one hates.
Konqueror was an indifferent browser but a great file manager --- so they exchanged it as default file manager for Dolphin, which is utterly awful and requires as well frequent monitoring to stop it sucking up memory; the loss of the Menu Bar on many applications is tragic, since however old-fashioned they deem it, it remains better than anything they can come along with --- CTRL+M may bring it back for now, but why make it required ? As with most of these repairs newcomers won't even know it's an option, or know what it was like to have a Menu Bar...
It's all about doing to the Devs' way, not as one likes. Everyone knows the cool people only want black everything, however poor their eyesight: Gwenview until last year had a sliding colour-bar to determine the background to images from white to black, all the shades of gray, exactly precise. Then it went to a preselected set of buttons on the base-bar Background Colour ( which turns out to be white ), White, a mid-Gray, and Black. Choice diminished. A week or so ago it went for a while after a reboot to all black all the time. There is no benefit to the changes.
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Perhaps worst are all these vile Gnome/Red Hat droppings left around: it took a lot of work to disable the beastly GVFS which filled the task manager with many unkillable CPU gobbling instances; but now it is virtually impossible to remove GAMIN aka gam_server in the task manager or synaptic, which uses around 69% of CPU on occasion --- why ? because like all-embracing systemd, if one tries, it takes out a host of other needed things, including Kate, Ark, PlayOnLinux Dolphin, Gwenview, Bleachbit, Filelight, KcharSelect, Kio etc. etc.. It's just a file monitoring system [ out of FAM ]: no need for it to be so intertwined.
[ Note well, it would also take out Baloo and Akonadi; which would be a blessing if I didn't take out all the spy stuff anyway, including Virtuoso and Strigi. Semantic Desktops suck, so very, very hard. ]
[ Note well, PCLinuxOS is systemd-free. ]
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Once they get rid of the classic menu I will have to leave.