I've used Linux for longer than KDE or GNOME have existed. But for as long as they have. KDE has been my home for the whole time, apart from the early plasma days. Apart from enlightenment, which you don't generally hear much about these days. Though it's still chugging along.

It's always been extra configurable. In the early days it was like a flashy open-source CDE. But it's just grown to continually have more capabilities and more polished. GNOME sort of did the opposite thing here. Which works for some people. Not myself, but some people. Designing the system to be used one way and one way only. So much so that even people like systems, 76, abandoned using them as a base. Designing their own desktop environment called Cosmic.

Also KDE has been improving its performance a lot!

KDE actually uses less RAM at idle than XFCE. It's been optimized like crazy.

Insane that the most feature-heavy DE in existence is also one of the lightest, most efficient major DEs in existence.

Arch. It's on a work computer and reinstalling and picking something else instead of troubleshooting was the faster option. I needed to get stuff done with the computer.

I'll probably try it on my home computer at some point. But that is left for another day.

Bazzite is Fedora-based, so shouldn't be functionally different. It just comes with Steam, Protontricks and a bunch of other gaming utilities pre-installed and easy to set up. And it's atomic, so in theory should be easy to roll back if an update messes up something (which I haven't had to do yet).

Agree on Plasma's customisation, there's been multiple times where I looked up how to do some stuff I've done on Win10 with Power Toys or 3rd party software only to discover it's a built in thing (like window tiling).

Yeah, the COSMIC desktop environment is relatively newly developed. I also just checked on the PopOS webpage and their newest version is still 24.04, so you actually tried a version from two years ago when COSMIC was truly newly available.

They've been working on the 26.04 release (based on Ubuntu 26.04) since April, but at some point, I read that they're still also heavily working on fixing up COSMIC to be actually decent, which is why that release is so delayed.

So, it could be that in a few months from now, it's been released and it won't be so buggy anymore.
But it still won't be nearly as customizable as KDE Plasma, as that just requires years of work and a big community, so make of that what you will. 😅