I think that is inevitable. KDE, Gnome, and Unity are the products of teams of developers whose first interest is their product. It's a bit like Debian, actually: "Debian is not a democracy", as one of their developers once wrote. Mate, however, started with a users' revolt against the developers. As for Xfce, their philosophy for the last 20 years seems to have been "If it's not necessary, don't do it". One of their team once described its goal as "to do the job without being under your feet or in your face."

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I was quite happy with the KDE packaged for Debian's stable branch in place of GNOME. It wasn't quite perfect: there's a few packages which aren't pulled in by default that make GTK programs fit in a little better. I'm not really partial to any of the desktops, they all have their little perks.

This is all my unsupported opinion, so take with a pinch of salt, but I wouldn't describe now as a particularly good time to switch to the the current version of openSUSE/Leap/KDE. Plasma/KDE5 hasn't, IMHO, progressed far enough to be as stable as I would like. Now, there are alternatives

• you could go 'rolling release' (with tumbleweed), but that's not something I'd recommend if you weren't a long-standing user with the corresponding experience
• you could probably go with 13.1, but is an old version, and is it really worth going for an older version worthwhile?

In a relatively short time (relative to what?), I'm sure that KDE will improve, but, given that the transition to KDE 4 was similarly problematic and for quite a long period of time, you might decide that this has become a habit and feel that you are better off not getting involved whole KDE thing at all, because, in this version of things, there will be a painful transition to the next major version and that will be along in a few more years.

Ho, hum.

Agreed.
It took 6 years before KDE-4., arrived at the point it was worth using again, IMHO, with the release of 4.13.x.

I would definitely recommend switching off GNOME3. I don't know how anyone could be productive with it. However, I also don't see switching to KDE. It's too bloated and slow (I know, it may not be while running, but on startup especially...) and as one distro reviewer once said, when you use KDE, you get the feeling something could break at any moment. I haven't tried it much lately, so I can't say if that's still the case. But I prefer Xfce or MATE. Here's why:

Xfce:
Faster than KDE or MATE.
Has all the functionality you need.
Simple.

However, it has the occasional long-term bug that doesn't get fixed.

MATE:
Slower than Xfce, but still faster than KDE.
Has all the functionality you need, plus a little more than Xfce due to GNOME background.
Rock-solid stability. I don't know if I've ever had a bug on MATE.

I prefer the speed of Xfce, and I can deal with the few bugs I find, so I choose Xfce mainly. However, some might prefer not to deal with the bugs and choose MATE.

The Xfce bug that irks me the most is the HDMI no-restart. If the HDMI display is turned off, or the system turns it off, it can't be restarted. At least not easily. I've remapped an unused key on my keyboard to run "xrandr --auto", which brings the display back. I have to close the display window it brings up each time I use it, but it works, and I've seen no compelling reason to switch to another DE.

I don't use or like KDE or GNOME. I use Xfce. Less bloat, works better.

IMO Debian does a pretty decent job of packaging all the DE's. They're fairly generic with only patches for stability or security, nothing major in terms of how they work. One of the many reasons I'm a big fan of Debian, while Gnome is their chosen default, they really have good support for Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, etc. And I agree, KDE 4.x in Jessie works wonderfully. And KDE 5.x in Stretch works as well as can be expected given it's limitations.

I do agree with whoever it was that commented that KDE Devs obviously never listen to their users. If there was another DE that made using my systems as easy as KDE, I'd switch in a heartbeat. But I'm old and no longer have any desire to have to edit text files to change settings every time I want to change something, and KDE is the only one that has everything I want (most notably a gui to change touchpad settings as I mostly use laptops), so I stick with it despite the developers refusal to make their release version stable BEFORE releasing it.

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I've pretty much always fallen back to KDE after trying out different desktop environments. When I first started out with Linux only about 5-6 years ago, I jumped around between fedora, linuxmint, slackware, opensuse, debian, and many others. The only times that KDE seemed unstable at times was on the distros that used new versions of KDE like linux mint and fedora. On Debian stable, I have no issues and is very stable.

But to answer your question, yes Debian can handle KDE very nicely and you don't have to switch to opensuse if you don't want to. I don't know if KDE runs any better or not on opensuse, i doubt it. Like I said above, it runs very well on my Debian Stable machines. I dont know if its a pro or con, but the latest distibution release of OpenSuse, I believe comes has a newer version of kde in it's repos. To me, its a con. But thats just a personal opinion reflected on my aforementioned experience. I prefer stability over having the newest apps.

Edit:
just as a side note, at work my machine has Debian. I run Mate desktop because i really love Gnome 2 (Gnome Classic) and is pretty customizable as well and very stable desktop environment.

Can't live without using KDE, specifically a few KDE apps. I time to time dabble with other desktop environments(but never GNOME3, I can't stand it) but KDE has to be the main DE. Its full on productive, too much for some people but 4.14.x has been really good so far for me. A little heavier on the memory department but usability takes over.

Linux Mint 17.3 KDE implementation is rock solid, so is in the Slackware -current so far.

Regards.

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I'm using Plasma 5 on OpenSuse Leap 42.1. Kwin_x11 crashed all the time on me. After Googling it, I changed a setting in my BIOS, and it's been rock solid ever since.

I've violently dis-liked GNOME ever since version 3 (though I do have the libraries loaded for the one or two GNOME apps I use...)

For my workflow process, I find KDE much more intuitive and efficient. (I need to try XFCE sometime...)

After MATE, kde is my second favorite desktop. Hell, if tony the tiger used kde, he will say, "It's GRRREAT!..."

Like sundailsvcs, I generally have both sets of libraries installed; hard drive space is cheap these days.

I much prefer KDE to Gnome 3, but I prefer Fluxbox or Enlightenment to both. MATE is also a nice job of work. Usually, I use Fluxbox; I have gotten so accustomed to mouse-clicking to access menus in Fluxbox and E that I always end up going back to one of them.

I often find myself using KDE applications in preference to their Gnome equivalents (Kate over Gedit, Okular over Evince, Konqueror as a file manager over Nautilus, and so on), but I can use Gedit or gnome-terminal quite nicely.

Just my two cents.

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I've tried KDE since it ships with Slackware, but I just can't do it. Too many options to change too much stuff, and it's just too easy to get lost changing things and then forgetting how to change them back.

That said, it does have some nice features, and I can see why a lot of people like it. Gnome, meh, not so much. They say it's set up for keyboard usage, but I never did get the hang of that, and Gnome apps ain't what they used to be, IMO.

I'm a tiler/tmux guy myself. Give me a keyboard, and except for websurfing (I use Elinks as much as possible, but I still need Firefox) I leave the mouse alone.

Well congratulations to all those "revolting Linux users", because I think MATE is one of the best DEs around.

Personally I have never liked the "look" of the earlier KDE. It just looked so old-fashioned.

I have just installed Kubuntu 16.04 on a spare laptop and I must say that the Plasma version is a huge improvement with clean and crisp fonts etc.

However, the File, Edit, View etc tabs in LO Writer still look pretty mean, ugly and ancient compared to those in Ubuntu or Linux Mint. Just a personal preference I guess.

On the other hand, I was able to tweak Konsole to my requirements (white text on black with a larger font) and it looked fantastic.