> But they didn’t feel familiar to me.

I'm shocked by this, especially when the alternative here is GNOME. You can put a lifelong windows user in front of a plasma machine and they will be able to figure it out easy. There is a start menu, a bottom taskbar, all the window buttons are where they belong, etc.

Contrast with gnome, where you can't get anything done unless you already know the magical keyboard shortcuts.

Plasma gets criticized often for having too many configuration options and too many features, which I think is just insane. It works perfectly well out of the box, but it allows you to tinker to your heart's content.