> The KDE4 days were rough

Back then whenever I had a chance to try a distro with KDE 4, the Crash Handler window would pop after doing stupidest and simplest things within the desktop. Gnome 3 wasn't any better - it was more stable but departing from desktop metaphor to this mobile-desktop hybrid made me avoid it and pick Xfce instead. Which is shame because KDE4 despite the problems looked really well (and still does); I once said here that it had this "younger sister of Vista's Aero" vibe. It's really cool that they managed to bring Oxygen theme back.

I also left Kde at the 4.0 time, and for a while was on Mac OS X, but nowadays I've given up on desktop environments - I just use xmonad and dmenu, and a mishmash of apps that serve my needs. I got tired of getting used to new/different affordances every few months/years.