The other day, my Windows 10's explorer.exe crashed when the file manager tried to load a directory, which is something that used to happen in Vista and hasn't happened in KDE for years IME.
This is very far from my experience. I installed OpenSUSE Tumbleweed (recommended as one of the best KDE distros) at the beginning of 2022 and ran into a dozen KDE Plasma bugs within an hour. Stuff like panel widths resizing just because I clicked "customize," or widgets vanishing when I tried to drag them onto panels, or the bluetooth icon vanishing from the status bar until I restarted my session, or even the settings manager freezing up.
The basic desktop worked well enough, but as soon as I started customizing it I ran into all sorts of paper-cut edge-case type bugs.
>Stuff like panel widths resizing just because I clicked "customize,"
This can be finicky, I can confirm.
>widgets vanishing when I tried to drag them onto panels
Widgets are also finicky. I don't use them. But they're niche KDE things that you don't really have on other DEs anyway, so I don't count it as diminishing KDE as compared to other DEs. :p
I've never used OpenSUSE, but, for what it's worth, I had tons of KDE crashes years ago when I used Ubuntu. I never had any on Manjaro or Arch, and I've used them for a few year now. My diagnosis there is that the rolling release model is paradoxically better than the point release model in terms of DE stability. I think that's the reason that KDE Neon is a thing (rolling DE updates atop regular Ubuntu). Tumbleweed is apparently a rolling release, though, so Iunno.
However, I always hear people sing the praises of its stability.
Is there a good theme/font/icon pack that you like that makes it look more polished without a lot of fussing on the end users' part?
But the DE, feature-wise, is so great compared to the others that it's like picking between a Volvo, a Model T, and several bicycles for my daily drive. The finish on the Volvo's dashboard is the least of my concerns; I'm just happy it's got AC.