I'm a big KDE fan and wish them well in this update. People complain about the papercuts, UI inconsistencies, and feature overload you find in KDE but if you follow Nate's blog on https://pointieststick.com, you can see that they are continually working to address all of these things. That KDE was Valve's chosen DE for Linux on the Steam Deck hopefully means yet more resources for additional polish and features.
I am also a big fan, It was actually KDE Plasma that convinced me to switch to GNU/Linux. I was offered distros with other desktops at first and all were lacking features and customisability. Only when trying out a distro with Plasma have I switched and remained. And I find it better then anything that is out there, even when counting closed/proprietary alternatives.
Just give me the ability to drive the ui over multiple desktops like it’s gnome: via keyboard shortcuts, and I’ll be open minded. Don’t make me touch the mouse. Then, add some nice ui transitions: keep transitions, don’t make them instant. Slide or fade things.
But last time I tried kde/plasma, I couldn’t pull it off and went back to gnome.
I used Plasma 5 with i3 instead of kwin [1] with 2 monitors for a while. Never really need to use the mouse when you don't want to. That is the whole reason I use i3 to begin with. It was fine. But I went back to normal i3. I just don't need all that desktop environment stuff. I don't know if I would recommend it, but it was doable.
I don't know about transitions or anything. I don't use transitions, so ... no idea. i3 just instantly switches between monitors or workspaces etc, though maybe someone has implemented transitions like they did with gaps? Again, no idea.
KDE allows for flexibility and choice about such animations. I dislike that sort of thing and disable them all, so I don't know how well the various options work, but I do know they're there.
You might want to try again. Plasma has virtual desktops, all kinds of UI transitions with animation speeds from "slow" to "instant", and a whole host of keyboard shortcuts available for switching desktops, windows, etc. They've also put good work into the System Settings window that makes these types of things easier to find and configure.
I think it would be very rare that someone would give configurability as their reason for leaving KDE / Plasma for Gnome. If anything, people tend to complain that KDE is too configurable.
I'm using KDE Plasma with multiple desktops and monitors using only keyboard shortcuts, it works pretty well. I can switch the focus to other monitors, send a window to another monitor, using keyboard shortcuts. There's an important configuration that needs to be set for this to work, which says each monitor has a separate focus.
I found the name of the option, it's "Separate screen focus", located in the settings under Window Management -> Window Behavior -> Focus Tab -> Multiscreen behavior
It looks like that last session only shows up when there are multiple monitors, which is why I could not find it on my laptop.
