Agree. Since the 4.8 release, KDE is getting faster and better. Here is my desktop - http://i.imgur.com/fBQCQ.jpg. A big thank you to the KDE community for creating this awesome desktop environment.
Are there any nice Linux distributions that are primarily based around KDE that I might have missed? I use Kubuntu right now, but it always feels a little like a second-class citizen compared to the mainstream Ubuntu.
Does anyone have any recommendations? The sheer number of distros on Distrowatch is a little overwhelming.
Slackware is, and most of its derivatives like SalixOS. The mainline comes with older KDE version: 4.8.5 -- but a longtime contributor, Alienbob, provides recent compilations at http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/kde-releases-4-9-3/
This is technically incorrect, since both Gnome and KDE are first-class citizens (and so is XFCE). You get to choose upon installation, and all three DEs are in the official main repository.
(This is just a minor correction. By all means, go with openSUSE, KDE support has been excellent for me over the years.)
I have only heard good things about Chakra[1], but unfortunately I have yet to try it out myself.
It's based on Arch linux and tries to be as pure KDE/Qt as possible.
It really has. I was pretty surprised to find myself settling on KDE after switching to Ubuntu, but with a few add ons and a fair amount of customization, I feel like I have an environment that I mesh with better than I ever did with OS X - which is saying something from someone who used a Mac from the age of 5.
And it did require quite a lot of digging around to get everything behaving the way I wanted, but unlike Unity or even GNOME, the things I wanted to customize were easily configurable. Well, except for mapping the meta key (by itself) to launch Synapse. That was a pain.
Preventing Akonadi/Nepomuk/Strigi nonsense from running helps with resources quite a bit (unless, of course, one actually uses them). My Ubuntu with KDE uses less than 400MB RAM idle and without the above.
It's 2012 and my laptop has 8GB of RAM, which means that my booted-up idle machine with a modern graphical DE uses less than 5% of available RAM. I wouldn't call it sad.
NEW low end laptops. My Linux desktop maxes out at 4GB. Not everyone is buying a new machine every 12 months. Resource constraints are still something that people have to work with. When you're developing for yourself its fine to just make it work on what you have but when you're trying to get others to use your project 'works for me, buy new hardware' isn't going to win you fans.
Sure, you shouldn't use the most recent hardware as your target, but neither should you spend development time and code complexity to avoid overtaxing 10 year old hardware.
I didn't know much about the KDE e.v. but now I feel like supporting the community :). Awesome work these guys did. Is there the same kind of organization for other main open source projects/communities? I highlighted the sentences I found the most interesting here http://tldr.io/tldrs/50b86deeada40f08170009f3.
Maybe its just me, but one thing I wish for KDE is better skins/theme-engines and icons. Oxygen maybe nice, but not really nice. Toolbars looks somehow ugly, unclean. Elementary OS, Ubuntu, Mate, Gnome overall are doing nice in skinning. I use QtCurve to get marginally better skin for my eyes.
I've been using kubuntu for two years.I can customize most of the stuff with KDE.It looks great, and fast ,responsive, and it's getting better and better.
It has come a long way since the disastrous release of KDE 4.0.