KDE has so many features I had never seen in other desktop environments. Which ones genuinely impressed you or still give you that “stars in your eyes” feeling every time you use them? Which features do you enjoy the most?
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Plasmoids: I constantly use an adesive note, the clipboard history and a color picker on my panel. Plasma is full of tools!
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The cursor shake game and wobbly windows (settings modified) do it for me. Little things are often overlooked, over purely functional features, sometimes 
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From the early Ubuntu days, with Compiz, the very first ‘Wow’ was the wobbly windows, then the Magic Lamp - previously something that had me drooling over my friend’s new Macbook.
But yes - ultimately not so overdone in kwin, and so much more stable and reliable, I would not survive the demise of wobbly windows.
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i like that i never have to mess with fstab or the command line to access my drives in dolphin.
apparently that a big hurdle in other desktops, but lucky i chose well.
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Yeah wobbly windows, plasmoids, and the OCR feature in Spectacle. I needed to re-construct my resume from some photos on linked in the other day, and the OCR feature made that very easy. Good stuff. Being able to click the Extract Text button and having it work so well is a life saver sometimes.
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Should reformat to itemise KDE functions in order of importance:
- Wobbly Windows - makes them feel real.
- Plasmoids opens a universe.
- OCR from screenshots (catching up with mobiles there)
- Magic Lamp window (un)minimising - shows where it goes.
- Stupid amount of customisable shortcuts
- Terminal inside Dolphin/Kate etc.
Mouse Gestures(awaiting further development - maybe in 2017)
I use the wobble window effects also and it makes me happy 
So far I’m impressed with how many respondents have mentioned wobbly windows.
But for me by far the most useful feature - possibly found in other desktops as well - is the ease of binding window manager actions to mouse buttons. I have been using the Logitech M705 for years both at work and at home, and these bindings are indispensable for me:
- Tilt mouse wheel left/right = scroll one virtual desktop to the left/right. I usually have four virtual desktops and have them set to wrap from 4 → 1 when scrolling right and 1 ← 4 when scrolling left
- Side mouse button (lower) = show windows on current desktop
- Side mouse button (upper) = show all desktops
- Mouse thumb button (only present on older M705s) = scroll activities
- Ctrl+click mouse wheel = open a Konsole
Worked for several decades designing integrated circuit chips using very complex and sophisticated tools that tended to open a new window for just about everything. These mouse bindings made me significantly more productive.
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I think we also need a desktop gravity setting to go with wobbly windows, so you can enable gravity, and you can watch the windows squish and wobble at on the bottom of your screen. Not great for productivity, but great for entertainment.
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i always find myself making the cursor as big as i can while im waiting for stuff to download xd
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I tried using GNOME after my first 2 months of KDE and i felt very restricted, even with the extensions.
mainly because of the ability to drag a window from one virtual desktop to another. this is such an underrated feature that ive never seen anyone use. its a complete deal maker for me
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Desktop Animation Magic Lamp.
They moved it some time ago to it’s current location and I almost lost my damn mind trying to find it.
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The cursor shaking for sure. But also the split screen features of many programs. Managing a lot of windows becomes so much easier when things become bound together which are related and required side by side.
And not to forget the forum.
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None. As a long term linux user there isn’t much kde brings to the table as being new. From what i’ve see in the previous reactions like woohooo “magic lamp” , “wobbly windows”, “stupid amount of shortcuts”, “color picker”…etc. Nothing new there. At all. But, in terms of a desktop environment it’s cool. I guess it’s a gen ( despite the “older” guys) that knows nothing but a DE thing. A groupie ( kde vs gnome, vs whatever…) DE thing. Still…cool.
Which could also be interpreted as “wow feature”, if we give a look at Windows that introduces more useless features than keeping “wobbly” functional. I think you also have something you like about KDE, otherwise you would not be active here, even if it is not new and even if GNOME does the same thing. Don’t take the thread too serious.
Hence the “cool”. And, I haven’t been using windows in a zillion years so I’ve no idea about that. Proves my point about them kde activists but um…please don’t tell me to take anything serious. Not even being “active” here or taking anything too serious and all that.
Hence you prove your own bubble-mind (you think you are true, so you are true). As KDE activist I probably only contribute much more to GNOME, because I make GNOME worse to let KDE shine bright and not because I see benefits in both projects. 
I’m out.
We all suffer this - and many things aren’t on the list here.
- Activities - totally amazing for those that use them, not least because different activities can have a set of widgets to suit the task in hand.
- Mouse Gestures - again, completely revolutionary for people that used them.
- krunner is under-the-radar but the best complement to the main launcher.
- Granular customisation - only if you use it though. If you do, it’s something that pulls you in and makes you say ‘Wow - this sucks’ when you move to another desktop.
It’s fine for people to be completely unimpressed. Many are unimpressed that F4 pulls up a terminal in your KDE applications, many don’t have any use for yazi file manager, fzf or zoxide…
To accomodate the simple clickers, the keyboard shortcut freaks, the terminal geeks, and people who just make it up as they go along…
That would be the biggest Wow - and it’s one thing that brings Gnome users to Plasma. It’s not as ‘hard’ or ‘rigid’.
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Most important to me: the abillity to configure pretty much every keyboard shortcut.
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Krunner is so handy!
Enjoy the mouse pointer bloating up to know where it is.
Forgot to mention… having to dual boot with Win 11, noticed how the latter has been increasing its RAM usage to 85% while KDE Neon remains pretty well around 62% (browsers and other stuff open of course).
Must look into Plasmoids and Spectacles’ OCR capabilites.
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