I wish Pop OS would tackle KDE. It's a much better DE (particularly if you like to customize), but there are very few (if any) distributions which have an opinionated tuned experience out of the box.
A couple more recent annoyances, of many: Plasma looks great but frequently my panels go missing and don't reappear until I restart plasma shell. Dolphin has all the functionality I want and looks great, but frequently fails to watch directories for new files, forcing me to F5. Lots of little things like this turn into death by a thousand papercuts.
The latest GNOME versions are even buggier, and when it does work, it feels like a toy project compared to KDE. It's baffling to me that it's been years since the v3 controversy, yet the project still doesn't feel as mature and polished as KDE Plasma.
All v2 forks also feel like someone's hobby project to bring disparate tools together, rather than a cohesive desktop. I'm sure some MATE and Cinnamon fans would disagree, but IMO the modern desktop experience has moved on since 2010.
Similarly with LXDE, Fluxbox and a myriad of others. These are great for certain environments, but none of them can compare to the polish that KDE has, let alone something like macOS.
To be fair, I'm not bashing on minimalistic or window manager-only setups. I've been using bspwm on Void Linux for many years now as my main working environment, and wouldn't change it for the world. But when I want to stop being productive, consume content, and not have to troubleshoot issues on my machine, I prefer to use a more featureful environment with a friendlier UI. Since macOS is out of the question, and Windows is purely for gaming (and even that is going away, thanks to Valve), KDE is pretty much my only choice on Linux. Which I've been enjoying for a few months now on NixOS.
But I do wonder if there is really a DE that can compare to it. AFAIK more ambitious projects like elementary OS, Deepin and Solus are still experimental, to the point where I don't even keep track of their updates.
This is an interesting viewpoint. My ideal DE is one that is "invisible", so to speak, and I've found that GNOME comes closest to it. I want to launch whatever program I'm using and focus on it's window. KDE has too much chrome, too many elements, so many options. It feels too "busy" to me. Ditto its apps, e.g. comparing okular to evince. Too many buttons, too many UI elements (I know I can remove them, but I don't want to have to, and all the functionality they expose I can do on evince using keyboard shortcuts), and all I'm interested in is the document I'm reading.
To each their own, I guess, I just wanted to put forth the alternative viewpoint.
Like I said, I use a WM-only setup for productive work to avoid any distractions, but when I want to consume content, connect peripherals and prioritize ease of use over efficiency, then I prefer to use a more polished DE. I enjoy KDE precisely because it gives me all the options to customize it however I like, so I prefer having access to all the knobs to do so, which GNOME purposefuly hides. Other features like desktop widgets are a nice bonus.
KDE is not perfect; it sometimes freezes on me, which might be specific to my hardware or due to an unrelated driver or Xorg issue. This is why I wanted to know if there are alternatives with the same feature set. GNOME, unfortunately, isn't it.
There are some very prolific people involved in the KDE project, but from my understanding some of the largest KDE distros, e.g. Kubuntu, are conservative and slow to contribute anything.
GTK 4 along with Gnome’s decision to limit customization is a massive step forward IMO.
Gnome will be able to build a consistent and stable desktop and developers building apps using GTK will not be bombarded with bugs caused by random user customizations, which are usually hard to reproduce, hard to debug, hard to fix, affect a small number of users, and are likely simply frustrating to deal with for devs.
But, maybe that’s not the right choice. Great thing about Linux is that if that’s the case Gnome will wither away and KDE (or other DEs) will quickly surpass it.
My bet is on Gnome however.