Yeah, Plasma isn’t great under heavy IO and as far as I can tell that’s not really getting fixed in Plasma 6. It’s one of the biggest problems I have with it right now. On faster storage it’s not really a problem, especially on SSDs, but on slower storage it can definitely be. I would recommend trying a different desktop.

GNOME is generally heavier than Plasma, but might indeed perform better in the scenario. You don’t have to use GNOME with GNOME applications if you don’t like them. You can easily use GNOME Shell and Plasma applications. There other desktops worth a try outside of GNOME and Plasma, tho. LXQt should be very fast. Enlightenment even more so.

Also, I don’t think memory safety is among KDE’s biggest concerns. Qt afaik handles a lot of the memory management and it is a professional toolkit which has received a lot of testing. It shouldn’t be too problematic. Writing memory safe code is also much easier in C++ than it is in C. Yeah, Rust is better, but it doesn’t seem to me like this is something that’s causing that many problems in KDE.

GPT in French is literally pronounced the same as “I farted”.

Nemo? Thunar?

A product of its time. KDE 2 released in 2000 and this is a pre-release screenshot of a non-default theme. The default KDE 2 theme looked like this. It was competing with the likes of Windows Me, Mac OS 9 and GNOME 1.

mpc-qt is also pretty good

Or Blender? Or Cinelerra? Or ShotCut? Or OpenShot? Or Olive? Or Pitivi? The open source video editing landscape is frustrating. So many competent projects competing with each other, none of which have clear superiority. And nothing that comes close to the proprietary offerings. Feels like we might be closer if developers weren’t split eight-ways.

especially considering KDE already has an application with almost exactly the same name for the same purpose https://invent.kde.org/utilities/alpaka

OnlyOffice is not based on LibreOffice. There might be a point in joining forces with OpenOffice if OpenOffice actually had forces to join with, but it doesn’t because it is a dead project.

It’s not an unpopular opinion that Apple is the only one that does sleep right. It is an unpopular opinion that this is only possible because they have a complete walled garden and that open platforms are fucked, especially considering it is easy and common to install applications from outside the App Store on macOS. We used to have sleep figured out, that’s what S3 was. But then hardware vendors dropped it. So yes, drivers and hardware vendors are part of the problem. The Steam Deck is an example of an open platform where sleep works fine.

Content blockers like uBlock use filter lists which list every single element that needs to be blocked across the entire web. I currently have nearly 700000 of these filters active. That is very far outside the scope of a simple script. Basically all ad blocking userscripts are site-specific and they still usually block significantly less than uBlock would on the same site. Also, userscripts are not safer than extensions.