Plasma 6 started very prone to crashes in my laptop when it released. I like how it works a lot more than Gnome, but Plasma tends to be buggier for me too.
This last month I've been having rendering issues in a lot of software, like Firefox and Okular in Fedora 41 (and now 42). I don't know where they came from as it was pretty much perfect last month.
Sometimes I think I'd prefer to return to xfce in laptop (like I tend to use in desktops) or use labwc.
In my experience KDE on OpenSuse and probably Fedora are rock solid. The first and nowadays probably also the second (which has moved to first tier instead of being a sub-distribution) are considered reference implementations of industry strength distros.
My thought would be that you've added something slightly broken to the mix which breaks KDE. It can happen. Linux is complicated, KDE is also complicated, what annoys one desktop can be ok with another. If you want to figure out what the problem is, you'll have to go through your various system logs to see what fails.
Look at the reddit called "unixporn" and search for Xfce. You ll see what's possible with Xfce. For me the KDE crashes are a dealbreaker. My Xfce setup is so simplified, that nothing can be ugly. I use Bspwm for the windows and stripped down Xfce panel (dont touch third party status bars, such as polybar, its waste of time if you already have Xfce). No menu such as Whisker menu, but Rofi instead. I got Xfce stability without the old looking.
Most of those issues I do not have. By waking from suspend, do you mean hibernate? A system d update broke that last year in OpenSuse and I'm assuming other distros. I sleep now and it wakes fine.
I’ve been using it on two older systems (4-8 y) one without a ssd or graphics card and it works flawlessly. As others suggested maybe you check your graphics drivers. I used to have problem with kde some time ago but since coming back it’s been nothing but smooth sailing.
I have never gotten KDE to work well... but I'm a shitty user running on shitty hardware so grain of salt and all...
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