The new KDE Plasma 6 desktop is shaping up to be a top-quality alternative to the failure that is Gnome. It has working thumbnails in the file picker, you may even hold Control and use the mouse wheel to scale the thumbnail preview for a better view. The overall presentation is top-notch, and the system settings menu has everything in one location. KDE is back in a big way. What Linux needs is a clean and usable desktop environment to better present the desktop to potential users. And this is what we get with the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment. Gnome thumbnails do not show by default and you need to open Nautilus first to generate the thumbnails and then they show, this is not good in 2024. Gnome developers are lazy. But at least the KDE devs care about the final product and do not just assume that a kludged-together product like Gnome Shell would be good enough for Linux. A sleek desktop like KDE is a good alternative and looks amazing in 2024.
The KDE Plasma login screen is very clean and usable.
The old KDE 2 desktop was a very nice and clean desktop to use on the computers of the time. Below is a screenshot from 2004.
The KDE settings screen also allows the theming of the SDDM login screen as well by selecting themes. And the Night light option allows a very useful blue light filter, built right into the desktop environment. Even the boot splash screen may be changed, there are so many features. The size of the window borders may be changed as well, this is light-years ahead of the Gnome desktop with the massive window title bars and borders.
Download the KDE Plasma 6 live ISO here: https://files.kde.org/neon/images/unstable/20231224-1120/neon-unstable-20231224-1120.iso
This may be used live or installed for further use.