The ones that want a DE that works exactly how they like it. I quickly lose my focus from having to deal with even the most minor annoyances and KDE lets me change the little things very easily.
I use KDE because I like its relatively polished design and philosophy of flexibility and empowering power users. I can and I do wrestle things that I don't like into a shape I like.
I still have to put up with many, many downsides around its stability, bugs, resource consumption, being written in C++ and builds being a nontrivial exercise.
I can sympathize with those for whom KDE does not suit well.
I use KDE because it’s stable, has every feature I want, and uses existing metaphors I am familiar with.
In my circle of Linux users, a lot of the people that choose KDE do so because they don’t find the desktop layer interesting to hack on, and just want a tool for interacting with Linux.
It just feels simple and keeps out of the way. I used KDE way back, before v4, and it was my favourite DE then. But it always had these broken glitches and an over abundance of settings and utilities that were not always on par with the core KDE. I have learned that I prefer less with even quality than more with uneven.
On the other hand, KDE is the most configurable DE I've ever seen. I've never looked too much at its defaults because I usually switch to KDE in my "let's customize everything" moments (and get back from it in my "let's learn to live with defaults" ones).
Being able to bind almost everything (including running custom scripts) to a keyboard shortcut, having tons of desktop options you can force by matching window or app properties, using special attributes or regexps, all of that screams "don't use default and customize me" to me, which is where KDE really shines, IMO.
As a KDE user i agree with this point of view. KDE is the most customizabile DE ever created. You can tweak the crap out of it to make it look and behave EXACTLY the way you want it. And, from my experience, the performance of the current 5.x version (running on Wayland) is very good.
I'm a nerd who spends most of his time in "ugly" terminals; but KDE is still my preferred DE.
Since I use tmux heavily and am often found browsing the net in lynx (or just curl when I'm looking for something specific), I could get away without Xorg completely if I had to. But KDE just seems to compliment my workflow nicely.
Everyone is different though. I wouldn't ever push my preferred WM/DE's onto anyone else any more than I'd expect to like whatever set up they've fallen in love for.
I'm one of those weirdos who loves KDE. KDE was the first DE I used back in 2007 when I first installed / had help installing Slackware on my computer by a friend. Once he installed it for me, I tried doing it by myself without his help and succeeded. The only thing I'll never truly care for with KDE is the browser it comes with, it's like another IE type of browser, and it gets confusing cause KDE will open websides in more than just Konqueror but another weird browser-like thing. There's also like two different file managers... I really do hope they kill off the weirdness. But KDE allows me to refine my desktop to feel like either Windows, Mac, Linux or a mixture. I can decide what my panels look like, where they go and how they behave.
It was Gnome 2 that gave me this power. When KDE 3.5 died and KDE 4 came out (around Vista times) it felt so sluggish and unstable and I ditched KDE for Gnome. Then Gnome became buggy and a lot less customizable. It still is, plugins and all. I really enjoy that KDE never took my freedom to configure my DE however I see fit, without having to install plugins. In that respect I'll always love KDE more. To be completely fair I still find myself using Gnome sometimes, it's not as awful as it once was, but KDE makes more sense to me. I just wish I could map the damn windows key to open the "applications" menu (one of those random things I wish KDE would just let me do), er I mean the "meta" key.
It doesn't annoy me, it makes me laugh. As for friends and family, I've already switched two of them to Mint/KDE and they're both quite happy with it as it suits their limited needs extremely well (web browsing, simple document editing, watching DVDs) and is extremely reliable.
I really like KDE.
The philosophy that an DE can have extra functionality rather than the standard "if it doesn't run on a 10 year old ThinkPad, it's trash."
Of course I'm being a bit unreasonable since the majority of desktop users likely are running vms and accessing it it over VNC/xRDP/Guacamole. And so require something snappy.
I'm running KDE Neon on a Lenovo T450 and an XPS 13. And the experience is great.
However high dpi is hell to configure, still not happy with it.
I know a lot of people hate KDE because of the early 4.x builds. It has gotten a lot better now, and it's constantly getting even better.
If this is the case, he should take it for a spin. I find that it's the most customizable and user centric DE around.
There are a lot of settings you can tweak, probably too much for some, but I know each time I test Gnome/Unity/Xfce/Lxde/Cinnamon etc. I miss a lot of easily accessible settings.
The community is also great, there is a saying: KDE is the community, not the software.
I can't agree with this more and that's the beauty of KDE. If I'm sitting down using this thing 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, little niceties and optimizations go a long way to making me happy and productive. And it doesn't take very long to make these little tweaks.
KDE seems to be the only DE that actually follows the rule "if it's not broken, don't fix it". Gotta love the consistency over the some 15 years I've used it.
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