Yes...

Anything with more overhead than fluxbox might be bloatware.

KDE comes with some useful and powerful apps like okular, dolphin, and has a nice system setting tool. It is handy for setting up projectors in unfamiliar places when lectuing on the road.

KDE4 is throwing segfaults more often recently and is likely dead meat in regard to maintenance. KDE5 doesnt offer any real advantages and is buggy as all get out.

KDE5 dolphin does have a cool su mode but the appearance of kde5 aint nothin to write home about.

While kde4 is likely at the end of the road, kde5 doesnt seem ready yet.

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I prefer KDE4 as it is the default for Slackware. However, I do not foresee any problems using KDE5 when the inevitable changeover arrives.

I have recently tried some distros with Plasma5 and discovered some problems not present in v4. Some have workarounds like the hiding and/or disabling of kdesu but others, like a castrated krunner I have no workaround for as of yet. As far as I can tell krunner has been whittled down to nothing more than a one shot command line. Not only has all the wide-ranging functionality been wiped out but even History is gone. They said it was to return as far back as August of 2015 but almost three years seems a very long time if it is not just rumor or wishful thinking. These things substantially quell my desire to move to v5. For that matter I am still surprised Trinity got so little play. KDE 3.5 may have looked old and derivative but why should I have cared when it did everything I wanted it to? I'd pick it over Xfce any day and Gnome-based WM/DEs aren't even in the same league from my POV. On a positive note Enlightenment has done a decent job of refining and improving and may yet realize it's potential so long evading it's grasp.

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I used to prefer KDE4 over KDE5 because of the flat look of KDE5. I think flat look is ugly and a step back in GUIs appearance almost everywhere (including Google's Material design). Anyway KDE5 improved a lot the Breeze theme during time, especially by removing sharp corners, and this made it fine.

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I don't have any plans to use either version of KDE, but I would really like qt5 in Slackware, so KDE5 got my vote.

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My vote is on KDE 4. Recently I've started using the Slackware Live DVD on one of my laptops which doesn't have a hard drive at the moment; I for one would not even try to boot a QT5/KDE5 live anything until that comes down significantly in size.

I confess, I use BLFS for my daily computing. But because of this I know exactly how many dependencies KDE 5 has vs KDE 4 and their sizes. I piled QT5 and KDE 5 in a single directory which takes up at least 2 GB. For the last several months, I have been testing out my latest BLFS build in a chroot while my older, more stable BLFS runs the system. I tried my best to get KDE 5 to look like my old KDE 4 (no breeze, use Oxygen with qtcurve, dark, kind of resembles Mepis from back in the day). The oversized widgets took forever to change, which required hacking hard-coded qml files.

All of this testing was for naught though - KDE 5 runs very well (at least once I disable all tooltips on the application switcher) so long as I run it in Xephyr. Running it natively on my laptop makes it utterly unusable (Plasmashell crashes every hour at least, kwin a couple times a day). This is a huge disappointment, particularly as none of my hardware is even the least bit obscure.

It's very sad because the KDE programs like Ark, Konsole, Gwenview, Spectacle, Dolphin, and the like, all work as expected. It's the darn "shell" and compositor that are really alpha quality, even still. I know this might not be the case now, but in the past some KDE developers (specifically kwin) always liked to point the blame elsewhere for their components no longer working, even though their KDE4 counterparts worked as expected.

Another problem: KDE 5 wants to rely on obscure backends to get things like Shut Down, Suspend, et al to show up on the menus. KDE 4 does not. Unless distro maintainers can address this then the only workaround is to put custom menus somewhere else, because the Power / Session menu is just bloody uneditable.

My advice is, if it still works, keep using it. If none of the components are network-enabled then age shouldn't be much of a concern. Who cares about desktop environments liking a particular init system - if they choose to go that route, ignore them. LFS teaches you how to build a bootable, base system without any of that, and that does look rather future-proof. No one ever said that a single distribution has to support EVERY desktop environment, anyway.

Now if upstream KDE would just fix the bugs (and hold off changing other things long enough to actually verify that the bugs are fixed), and make more pleasing, non-"material", non-Breeze themes, then an update to KDE 5 might be in order.

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Dear @ordealbyfire83, you are kind to explain how your opinion as BLFS user is relevant for Slackware Linux?
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Some pages ago I said that the title of this poll is wrong made, and many, but many non-Slackware users voted here, mistaking it as a general poll. They argued.

Sure, a huge advantage for Plasma 5 is convenient for some.

BUT still I believe that the poll has zero value, because it is polluted by the votes of non-Slackware users...

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Well, I just today read through this thread. Since I don't use kde, it didn't seem relevant to me.

Comments:
1. I agree there should be a choice for "other" in the voting. I seldom install kde. Fvwm has
served me well across the years. I see no reason to change at this time. I have installed
Slackware with kde-4 and tried it. Went back to fvwm.

2. Nice job of "Darth bashing"!

3. When Slackware uses kde-5, I'll try it. Who knows what will happen. . . .

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Qt5 can obviously be installed alongside Qt4 and this is easily done already, so this argument is moot.

Nobody suggested to drop FVWM from Slackware and this thread's topic is not "which graphical environment do you prefer?", so this looks OT to me.

I just added an useless post to an useless thread (as the answers are unlikely to influence Patrick's decision and rigthly so), I know...

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I agree with ordealbyfire83 that Plasma 5 desktop isn't perfect but I require the programs that it comes with. The compositor worked fine in KDE 4 but has some minor issues with NVIDIA in Plasma 5. I disabled the KDE compositor and baloo, and haven't had any issues since.

Doing the "agreeing play", I would like to note that the Kate from KDE4 is able to open around 2300 files for a 1GB memory consumption.

While the shiny one from Plasma 5 sends in the swap usage a box with 16GB memory, trying to open the same set of files.

I guess that it eat at least 10 times more memory than the KDE4 counterpart.

I really loved that glorious memory "optimization" !

@Darth: you filed a bug upstream then, didn't you?

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Ouch, you might want to stick with Slackware 14.2. Is having 2300 files open in Kate what you usually do?

What sense have, when they love to restart everything from ground zero, again and again?

Let's look with happiness at the Qt6 which will be released this very year. Then, they delete everything and write all over again giving us the Plasma 6. Which will crash as usual and will be even more ugly.

Oh, wait! Maybe I am the only one trying to do something useful with that poor editor?

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