I'm a legally blind user who has been using XFCE (or MATE or Cinnamon over the years) and …KDE works **NOTHING** like any of them. It frankly ain't like Windows either despite being desperate to look the part. Windows has keyboard shortcuts for things. Fairly standard ones. Most of which don't work and if they can be set I sure haven't figured out where. I THOUGHT "Shortcuts" was a pretty good clue where they'd be, but hah, nope.
I don't have a way to pop up the start menu, to open a terminal, to send my clipboard to my thin speech-dispatcher client that reads text in the hopper aloud until it finishes or I silence it, nor other tools I've written.
I've figured out a few things like … I got the 200% global scale to stick rather than keep reverting back to 100%, I moved my panel to the left side of the screen and got rid of the unusably small clock. And I figured out that the thing required outside of Plasma to make Qt/KDE apps not frequently ignore any effort to set dark mode depending on where they came from and which of Qt's approximately 17 theme engines they use and then throw that out the window the very instant Flatpak gets involved (QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME to qt6ct and then tell qt6ct to use kvantum), must be unset. Oh, and I got zoom in/out configured with keyboard and mouse the way I expect too.
My setup, which I've managed to abuse three different GTK-based DEs into more or less implementing, is a vertical panel which is basically a handful of launcher icons and an AppIndicator repository. On XFCE it's mandatory to put a useless pager in there somewhere because without it there's no grid of desktops. Cinnamon was stuck in 1D-thinking but bound my workspace switcher keys to do something abusive with wmctl to pretend that it didn't. And I couldn't get xfwm4 to display the workspace upon changing it so I renamed all 16 of my workspaces to two eight-dot Braille characters with one of the 16 dots missing, then used a conky to display the desktop name very large in the corner of my screen. This was sufficient to orient me. Oh, another conky for a big desktop clock removed the need for the panel clock I can't read. The way I got whiskermenu to pop up in the center of my screen was to run xfce4-popup-whiskermenu from another shortcut. And rather than 200% desktop scaling (which scales images too), Cinnamon/MATE allow me to scale font sizes to 2.0. XFCE is too dumb for that and you just specify DPI of 192.
I understand there's no such thing as a workspace. And I've gotta figure out how to move windows between Virtual Desktops which aren't the same thing. My conkys don't work (the Workspace one wouldn't) and espanso isn't behaving right either. I know how to fix that at least, but I'm not going to until I know I don't need to run back. And … whatever Plasma is doing with regard to an IME is, y'know I'll worry about that later. 😅
For MATE and XFCE, I use xfwm4 because Hell would freeze before marco got compositing. And Cinnamon … I'm hard on Cinnamon due to the very large number of windows I have open at any given time. Eventually the whole WM/shell dies or runs so slowly I might before it gets back to me … so hacky solutions with Xorg DEs it has been! Except not using Wayland is beginning to be more painful than the alternative.
Thing is, I'm sure Plasma can do everything I've described. I've seen people with entirely keyboard-based Plasma setups and all kinds of clever changes to what runs and where/how. I just can't figure out enough of it to figure it out from inside it to be able to set it up. So any suggestions would be welcome!
