It's time to get KDE Plasma a try, I guess
Go for it
Before you try, you won't know if it works for you or not.
I personally like XFCE and LXDE, and will simply switch between Gnome/XFCE/KDE at login time, by selecting the session type, depending on what I do. Although I don't like Gnome much, I keep using it to keep my experience fresh so I can help students having issues with it on the exact same hardware.
If you can afford the time and effort in experimenting a bit -- as in, using the different ones when trying to accomplish actual tasks, but recognizing that the UI being unfamiliar means it will feel odd and clunky at first --, I do definitely recommend testing the different ones; even up to seeing how hard/easy they would be to customize to your own needs. In practice, that means that at random, when you have a task to accomplish, but extra time to do it in, use a different Desktop Environment to see how you would accomplish the task there. The best test cases are the dull ones, like creating backups, examining your archived emails, connecting to network shares or your own NAS box, and so on.
(The first thing I do when I create my own user account in any Gnome variants, is adding my own Oblivion-derived theme to the terminal and text editors. I need fully black backgrounds, as I use them full screen and switch between them, and dark background seems more comfortable to my eyes than light backgrounds. I don't even bother keeping the XML theme file around; I just edit it on the fly. Not
everything needs to be optimized; it is always a balance, and it will change in time.)
I must admit that in my particular case -- I deal with a lot of tabulated data in text form, PDF versions of published articles, and so on -- knowing bash, find, sed, and awk (and related command-line conversion utility toolkits, like NetPBM tools and GhostScript/Poppler scriptlets) makes a much bigger difference than any of the desktop environments. You don't need to remember their syntax offhand, except for
POSIX basic and/or extended regular expression syntax, which you should consider a mathematical form for expressing matchable character sequences, but being familiar with their use means that rather than looking for GUI or DE tools to find/catalog/index something, you write a single-use
stanza on the command line to accomplish the task in one go. I keep a browser tab open to
bash,
awk, and
make user guides (single-page versions), plus man pages open to
sed,
find,
stat,
xargs, or whatever tools I think I might use, because I do not bother to remember the details; I only remember
how they work in the conceptual level. Works just fine. Even stuff I've never done before feels easy, as long as I have the necessary information on the file formats, problem at hand, and what it is that one wishes to accomplish. (This also means I find "tests" where someone asks what option
X does for command
Y ridiculous: why would you bother remembering such details, when you can trivially check? My brain is limited, and I'd rather use it to solve problems than store facts and details that I can in any case look up faster than I can speak them out loud.)
Usually, the bottleneck is my brain, trying to figure out whether I am looking at the problem at the right level of abstraction. I don't know how many times my subconscious pipes up five minutes later or the next morning, pointing out how to solve the undiscussed underlying problem with a small fraction of the effort. If I did a
every time, I'd have a dent in my forehead. So, I've learned that to accomplish things efficiently, I must think at them quite a bit first, rather than dive in head first. But I like doing that, too.
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