KDE? Lightweight? Even cinnamon is incredibly heavy next to xfce and lxde. Have you ever used a sub-4GB of memory machine?
I do second mint (LMDE) for a non gamer and non tech savy windows 10 refugee though, it’s debian so, stable, and cinnamon is an okay-ish middle ground between KDE usability and xfce weight.
My problem being quite package specific, it’s not impossible, the biggest offender being qt…
“User-friendly” and “updated” sadly sounds incompatible. In just slightly less than one year of using Fedora I’ve had 3 bad qt updates that broke kde’s softwares like kmail, 2 bad amd-gpu updates that made the gpu crash and 1 pipewire update that broke surround sound.
Those were all minor updates that were easy to revert though, just had to use the terminal for that and wait the next fixed version.
As someone in this category : wtf? I kept using the terminal all the time when I was still on windows. From 95’s dos to 11’s cmd.
This used to be a thing, my first ever ubuntu install was made through such a tool (damn I might be getting old), a .exe that I ran on my windows 7 and that rebooted to a live ubuntu environnement.
What you are describing sounds like plain old debian. Stable thing that you can occasionnally update, perfect for all your server stuff. All my servers run CLI debian (probably won’t be your case as you mentionned some gaming on it too) and I tend to forget about updating them (or even having them to be honnest) due to how stable the damn thing is.
Historically speaking, from what I’m reading is that gnome devs have a history of bad decisions birthing forks here and there “fine, I’ll do my own gnome, with blackjack and hookers” too, so I don’t know how much weigh such a decision can have to be perfectly honnest.
Damn, the amount of comments that didn’t even read the full… title… Is reading comprehension getting this bad? Middle clic paste isn’t getting removed, just being opt-in rather than opt-out, yet a bunch of commenters are up in arms “time to ditch firefox”…
KDE is incredibly “windows like”, the “bloat” you might be refering to are options. The only criticism I agree with here is the footprint, KDE is indeed heavy and not recommanded for old machines.