I must admit I was a staunch KDE user up until 2009 when KDE 4 was released. KDE 3 ran okay on late 90s hardware and could do everything one needed.
After that, it seemed to lose its way. It lost its ability to define key sequences as keyboard shortcuts or the ability to just use the logo key on its own as a keystroke in a shortcut (even today, it must be used as a modifier with another key). What didn't help is I was running a Pentium II 300MHz and 160MB RAM which really crawled with KDE4.
The KDE applications were fine, it was just the Plasma desktop environment that was particularly sluggish. So I adapted to using FVWM2 and just used the KDE applications in that.
The laptop in question used a joystick pointing device which was uncomfortable to use and only had 1 USB port, so I made the configuration keyboard-oriented. It works a bit like `vi`: I press the logo key, it pops up a menu… that's like `vi`'s "command mode".
From there, I press different keys to invoke actions… the menu has a helpful label and underlined keyboard mnemonic guides me as to what I'm after.
I wish I could do the same with XFCE actually. I have XFCE on my tablet (keyboard navigation is a moot point when you have no keyboard), and its a nice desktop environment to use… but I'm still yet to see something as configurable as the classic window managers like FVWM & co.
I'm now looking at dropping its applications because of slop.
