My experience with KDE is that it is a frustrating new user experience. I also doubt that the devs have tried setting up their desktop from defaults recently.
Kwallet (one of the two reasons I stopped using KDE):
Kwallets defaults are bad. They encourage you down an opaque path that requires CLI intervention. If you stubbornly take that path the performance of kwallet is painfully bad. Any electron app (discord, etc.) will now hang unresponsive on the main UI thread for 1 to 3 minutes if kwallet was not already open. None of these apps need kwallet. Chromium stalls in the same way on startup except that if you don’t want to open the wallet it will keep asking 3-4 times taking minutes to reach the prompt each time and won’t unblock the main UI thread until you either enter the password or it crashes with an error that too many wallet requests were issued. Protonvpn won’t open on KDE unless a wallet is configured and unlocked. The password prompt has a time out for no cryptographically good reason which means if you try to open the wallet and then wind up distracted by something else you may time out and need to restart the waiting game from square one. Bugs have been open against kwallet for years. Allegedly they have been fixed and I have updated but the speed is still awful on my computer.
Fractional scaling:
Nominally KDE does this the “right” way but practically application support seems somewhat absent. The flagship Linux office product, Libre Office, displays microscopically on one monitor with fractional scaling on. It just works on other DEs
Borderless fullscreen with mouse capture on multiple monitors is broken and results in the mouse wandering off and going MIA in FPS style games. KDE killed me in Helldivers several times before I switched windowing modes. Honestly minor except that it seems to be the default in gaming distros where this matters
Other DE issues:
Cinnamon freezes on haswell age Intel iGPs
XFCE handles cheap Chinese graphics tablets badly
XFCE fractional scaling is confusing and requires updating too many settings. The flip side of this is it can run fractional scaling much more performantly than other DEs under x11 on lousy iGPs. The problem here is not that the scaling controls are inverted but that the graphics scale settings are scattered all over the place.
All in all I would say that Cinnamon is a lot less frustrating at an entry level than KDE on recent hardware.
Do you have the issue tracker for kwallets issues? This is my first time hearing of these. Out of all the people I have given this to not one has had any complaints with kwallet, it’s possible these issues were resolved, although none of my users were using vpn’s.
libreoffice uses xwayland, so that’s really on them to fix and there are simple workarounds.
both of which are pretty quick fixes, kwallet can be replaced and the libreoffice issue is a toggle in the settings. I usually set people up and make sure they can do everything they need to, these issues seem very minor compared to the issues with cinnamon
My experience with KDE is that it is a frustrating new user experience. I also doubt that the devs have tried setting up their desktop from defaults recently.
Kwallet (one of the two reasons I stopped using KDE): Kwallets defaults are bad. They encourage you down an opaque path that requires CLI intervention. If you stubbornly take that path the performance of kwallet is painfully bad. Any electron app (discord, etc.) will now hang unresponsive on the main UI thread for 1 to 3 minutes if kwallet was not already open. None of these apps need kwallet. Chromium stalls in the same way on startup except that if you don’t want to open the wallet it will keep asking 3-4 times taking minutes to reach the prompt each time and won’t unblock the main UI thread until you either enter the password or it crashes with an error that too many wallet requests were issued. Protonvpn won’t open on KDE unless a wallet is configured and unlocked. The password prompt has a time out for no cryptographically good reason which means if you try to open the wallet and then wind up distracted by something else you may time out and need to restart the waiting game from square one. Bugs have been open against kwallet for years. Allegedly they have been fixed and I have updated but the speed is still awful on my computer.
Fractional scaling: Nominally KDE does this the “right” way but practically application support seems somewhat absent. The flagship Linux office product, Libre Office, displays microscopically on one monitor with fractional scaling on. It just works on other DEs
Borderless fullscreen with mouse capture on multiple monitors is broken and results in the mouse wandering off and going MIA in FPS style games. KDE killed me in Helldivers several times before I switched windowing modes. Honestly minor except that it seems to be the default in gaming distros where this matters
Other DE issues:
All in all I would say that Cinnamon is a lot less frustrating at an entry level than KDE on recent hardware.
Do you have the issue tracker for kwallets issues? This is my first time hearing of these. Out of all the people I have given this to not one has had any complaints with kwallet, it’s possible these issues were resolved, although none of my users were using vpn’s.
libreoffice uses xwayland, so that’s really on them to fix and there are simple workarounds.
both of which are pretty quick fixes, kwallet can be replaced and the libreoffice issue is a toggle in the settings. I usually set people up and make sure they can do everything they need to, these issues seem very minor compared to the issues with cinnamon