In fact, it was so unpopular that it inspired a fork of KDE 3: https://www.trinitydesktop.org/

(IMHO, later versions of KDE got good, but even today I understand the appeal of just sticking to the same thing)

And it still exists, by looking at the NEWS section! That's a long grudge to hold :)

I don't know that it's a grudge per se; people liked KDE 3, so they forked it and stayed on the working thing that they liked. Don't fix what isn't broken.

Yeah it's kinda the same thing that happened to gnome 2 though it wasn't really a fork but rather a respawn in the form of cinnamon.

I think you're thinking of MATE. Cinnamon is a fork of GNOME 3.

I was going to reply that current MATE is more "modern" that late Gnome 2 compared to "Trinity vs KDE3", but then I went to compare screenshots and I wasn't right. But in both cases I'm amused that people can get so attached to a UI paradigm that they rather fork it and spend time and effort keeping it alive. It doesn't really click with me, but I admire the effort.

Never understood that part really. I was using KDE 4 since 3.97rc2 (which wasn't easy to install and still had some glitches) and absolutely loved it.

It had a lot less features than kde3, all the semantic desktop stuff didn't work and kdepim didn't work either But they did run at 100% cpu very often.

Really? Interesting. I loved KDE3, but hated KDE4 so much (slow, unintuitive UI, bugs) that I haven't looked at it since, preferring Xfce instead. I guess I could give it a spin again...

I wanted to use KDE 4 when it released, but it kept crashing on my machine. I would update it every once in a while and try again but issue would always pop up. By the time "plasma 4.4 is stable" was declared, I had lost interest and started using tiling window managers .

That said KDE 6 is pretty solid. I rarely have issues with it.

I remember it being very slow and buggy, and missing a lot of features I liked in 3.5. Dolphin also felt like a big downgrade from Konqueror. I didn't start liking KDE again until Plasma 5.