> but two deserve a quick mention. The first is Kubuntu, which for my money is the flavor to beat. If you haven't tried KDE lately, you really should give Kubuntu a go. KDE is no longer the memory hog it once was, and Plasma 5.12 offers an incredibly nice, polished, and smooth experience.
Strongly agree. KDE/plasma continue to make great progress and it's my personal favorite. Looks gorgeous out of the box, is light on memory and the cpu, and offers great customization options. Since it uses a layout similar to Windows 7/10 people coming from the mentioned operating systems feel right at home and it eases the transition to linux (I've installed Kubuntu for a few non-technical people and so far no complaints!). If you're interested in following KDE's progress, check out Nate Graham's blog [0] where he publishes a weekly post going over new features and bug fixes in KDE applications and plasma. Really looking forward to plasma 5.13.
KDE too has cycled through removing the ability to put things on the desktop and reverted to allowing a "folder view" and then back to a traditional windows desktop (as one option).
They still do some kookie stuff with Plasma -- from big things like Activities to little annoying things like removing the drag-resize from the application menu (I fix the size in ~/.config after every update), and removing the KDE version info from the Dolphin file manager about menu. Weird little changes that make you wonder if someone's gone insane.
Mind you I disable just about every automation and haven't used KDE apps like kmail for a long time.
You always had an ability to put things on the desktop in Plasma, even in KDE 4.0. It just worked in a completely different way, unrelated to the "Desktop" folder in the filesystem.
Also, Alt+PPM works well for resizing the Plasma menus now. It was missing for some time due to architectural changes.
There was, in a form of the icon plasmoid. It worked and behaved completely differently than Folder View does, but if you really wanted, you could have some icons on the desktop. It still works, by the way - it gets created when you drag'n'drop something into the non-Folder View based desktop.
I think drag'n'dropping might have been added shortly after 4.0, but the icon widget was there from the beginning for sure.
Strongly agree. KDE/plasma continue to make great progress and it's my personal favorite. Looks gorgeous out of the box, is light on memory and the cpu, and offers great customization options. Since it uses a layout similar to Windows 7/10 people coming from the mentioned operating systems feel right at home and it eases the transition to linux (I've installed Kubuntu for a few non-technical people and so far no complaints!). If you're interested in following KDE's progress, check out Nate Graham's blog [0] where he publishes a weekly post going over new features and bug fixes in KDE applications and plasma. Really looking forward to plasma 5.13.
[0] https://pointieststick.wordpress.com/