Used Cinnamon (on Fedora) for several years, it’s an excellent DE in the classic (and therefore best) style.

Fedora KDE is hard to beat on the features that matter to noir_lord scale though, it’s always good to have choices.

Curious what features you like in KDE. I also like kDE, but don't use it as my primary DE - in the past, it has felt complex to me.

Still supports a proper taskbar, one per screen with windows from only that screen on that screens taskbar (that's just how I've done it since the 90's but it's a must have because I think in terms of screen relations to where stuff is, it's my mental model) and virtual desktops (Cinnamon and XFCE both do this as do others) and it supports Wayland (which is why I'm not still on Cinnamon which I really liked as it's just coming out of experimental support for Wayland).

You can also disable sorting of windows in the taskbar, disable combining them (eugh, I hate that so much) into a single entry (never understood that design choice on OSX or DE's that do it by default, don't hide my shit when there is space to show both).

It is complex for a UI in that there are lots of things you can tweak (spread around in the settings) but just because you can doesn't mean you have to of course.

I mostly just leave the defaults except for the above and rebinding a bunch of the window management, beyond that I strip it back to a start menu, taskbar and clock on both screens.

Mostly I like it because when I'm using it I never have to think about it, if I have to consider the DE (in that it's not just working the way I'd expect it to) then it's failing as a DE because it is getting in the way.

XFCE, Cinnamon and KDE all clear that bar (others may, they are just the last three I used going back well over a decade), Gnome hasn't since v2, KDE has defaults but it doesn't have "opinions" on how you should use it the same way as some of the others.

Switching to KDE from Cinnamon was a non-event after years of using Cinnamon, it took maybe half an hour to find the all the settings I wanted to make it work how I wanted.

It is extremely stable/polished (at least on Fedora) out the box, I want to use my machine to do things, playing with WM/DE's used to fascinate me and 25 years ago I had the inclination, now I just want boring software and a DE as the main interface to the computer should be boring in actual use.

TLDR: I want the classic WIMP desktop, I don't want to have to configure a bunch of half supported/unstable extensions to do it.