As a user and contributor to KDE, it is as ugly or as beautiful as you want to make it. I find the default skins in Suse / Manjaro KDE to be pretty good, of course there is still huge room for improvement and hopefully the design group makes kde5 look less 1990s beige office box.
It isn't any heavier than Windows. Hell, anything is lighter than Windows, and Vista has been running on almost every PC since 2005. So I'm not that worried about the "weight".
> Fedora seems to be the only decent distro for development right now
The only two breakages I've had in the last 6 months on Arch as my main development machine have been a kernel 3.13 bug that affects everyone (AMD cards are put in suspend mode even if they don't support it, which crashes the driver, and is fixed in 3.13.7) and an xorg configuration bug fixed in Xorg 1.16. Neither of which were game breaking, just inconveniences, but I did cherry pick my hardware to work with Linux (all open source drivers on everything, atheros nic, hd4600 + 7870 on Mesa, Intel ethernet and usb / etc).
Problem with Fedora is a severe lack of software availability. On Ubuntu you have PPAs, on Arch the AUR and pkgbuild.com, and on Suse you have the OBS, but on Fedora (and Mageia and friends) you have the rare independently hosted repo you have to add via config file. I've also had experiences with Fedora being just as unstable as Manjaro with their bleeding edgeness and lack of verbose testing on all devices before pushing near-vanilla kernels.
Even when Ubuntu switches to systemd, it is hard to recommend because rolling release just makes so much more sense in every use case except the unmaintained server or automation box, in which case I'd favor Debian anyway. I'm actually hopeful for Chakra, which is kind of floundering since they lost their web hosting and all kinds of nonsense, but the direction - consistent biannual update pushes to a rolling release, with thorough testing and a KDE base system that goes out of its way to avoid pulling it other frameworks for speed and footprint. It is a pretty pure fire and forget solution, albeit of course its just a community project.
ROSA is another one I'm hopeful for, since its business backed with support contracts and does some novel features on top of Mageia.
"rolling release just makes so much more sense in every use case"
Oh my goodness, no. Rolling release requires that I be prepared to deal with breakage any time I install anything from the repos (because, as Arch says, "partial upgrades are not supported", as a practical matter I have to update everything before installing anything.) Breakage is also a routine possibility any time I install security updates.
I also have machines that connect to the Internet solely through a cellular data plan. I have no desire to such bandwidth for all these updates.
Rolling release gets me nothing I'm interested in. I use Debian stable on all my machines.
> requires that I be prepared to deal with breakage any time I install anything
This is a failing of an improperly tested update, not of the model. You do need to beat all the possible glitches out of updates as they come in some testing repo, but if you do and you can deliver rock solid iterative updates it is the natural way to keep a system up to date.
It isn't any heavier than Windows. Hell, anything is lighter than Windows, and Vista has been running on almost every PC since 2005. So I'm not that worried about the "weight".
> Fedora seems to be the only decent distro for development right now
The only two breakages I've had in the last 6 months on Arch as my main development machine have been a kernel 3.13 bug that affects everyone (AMD cards are put in suspend mode even if they don't support it, which crashes the driver, and is fixed in 3.13.7) and an xorg configuration bug fixed in Xorg 1.16. Neither of which were game breaking, just inconveniences, but I did cherry pick my hardware to work with Linux (all open source drivers on everything, atheros nic, hd4600 + 7870 on Mesa, Intel ethernet and usb / etc).
Problem with Fedora is a severe lack of software availability. On Ubuntu you have PPAs, on Arch the AUR and pkgbuild.com, and on Suse you have the OBS, but on Fedora (and Mageia and friends) you have the rare independently hosted repo you have to add via config file. I've also had experiences with Fedora being just as unstable as Manjaro with their bleeding edgeness and lack of verbose testing on all devices before pushing near-vanilla kernels.
Even when Ubuntu switches to systemd, it is hard to recommend because rolling release just makes so much more sense in every use case except the unmaintained server or automation box, in which case I'd favor Debian anyway. I'm actually hopeful for Chakra, which is kind of floundering since they lost their web hosting and all kinds of nonsense, but the direction - consistent biannual update pushes to a rolling release, with thorough testing and a KDE base system that goes out of its way to avoid pulling it other frameworks for speed and footprint. It is a pretty pure fire and forget solution, albeit of course its just a community project.
ROSA is another one I'm hopeful for, since its business backed with support contracts and does some novel features on top of Mageia.