For KDE, Valve found it easier to work with KDE devs than GNOME devs.

They don’t. I cringe when people lie about Hexbear.

From hexbear

The lemmy devs are blatantly lying under this post, and I’m not engaging for the reason that I have better things to do than to argue with them and convince them to accept criticism they are clearly never going to be willing to hear.

Show us what they lie about. The devs have better things to do too btw.

Your issues are 5 upvotes average. There are a bunch of opened issues with way more upvotes than this.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues?q=is%3Aissue+sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc+is%3Aopen

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues?page=1&q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc

You can hide the notification icon, and check unread in https://lemmy.ml/inbox when you want to.

Ublock Origin Dashboard -> My filters, add: lemmy.ml##a[href="/inbox"].nav-link

Check this if all else fail https://github.com/revanced-apks/build-apps

KDE Neon is rolling release for DE. So it’s pretty much couple days waiting once Plasma 6 released or just instantly released.

You can always change the icons, Get new icons.... from the icons setting page. Theme in KDE is very easy to change.

Example
Theme: https://github.com/catppuccin/kde
Icon: https://store.kde.org/p/1340791

People who use Arch and just want GUI is asking for troubles sooner or later. It’s Arch so you will have to deal with the Terminal somewhere along the line.

EndeavourOS has a welcome page that list all the common operations you need and you just need to click it.

Instead of Manjaro, try EndeavourOS, easy Arch install with GUI.