I spent a few minutes setting up a Plasma desktop to resemble what I like about GNOME Shell. A screenshot doesn’t do it justice imho. Application Dashboard on Meta, Overview on Meta-W, a Panel and Icons-Only Task Manager set to Autohide at the bottom of each screen, and the Tiling Manager.
KDE isn’t much heavier than XFCE. On a modern computer, the difference is indiscernible.
No need for anything particularly modern. Even on a ten year old laptop I’ve not noticed a difference (Windows, on the other hand, barely runs at all on that machine).
My computers are pretty new. It’s the small things that really eat at you though.
Glad I switched even with the teething pains with Nvidia and wayland. I can always fallback on x11 until the bug is squashed. Always new little problems popping up like Nvidia isn’t really tested well on the Wayland side.