WetGeek I simply wanted to point out that I'd had nothing but trouble with Darkstar, and my glowing recommendation was about the full Plasma version. If I didn't make that clear in my posts, I'm sorry. I did not intend to mislead anyone.
Nor did I intend to mislead you or anyone else. Amend the relevant sentence to read "because I thought I should give it another look based on @WetGeek's glowing review of PCLinuxOS".
The reason I installed the "minimal" version (Darkstar) rather than the full version is because the full version includes a dozen or more applications that I will never use and would have had to remove to get a working environment. It was much simpler to add applications (Edge, LibreOffice and Zoom, and a few others) to the minimal build than wade through the mess of removing a ton of applications and then cleaning up the orphan/dependency mess that would most likely be created. In terms of the KDE Plasma DE or in terms of appropriateness for "an ordinary home desktop user", I don't think that there is a material difference between the minimal and full versions.
My opinion hasn't changed and would (most likely) not be changed if I were to install the full version rather than the minimal version. Starting with the login screen (which is a design throwback about 15 years), to the Task Manager (which handles application pinning/location differently and less cleanly than either Solus Plasma or Kubuntu Plasma, and sets up the clock so that it takes up unnecessary space and uses odd proportions in terms of the rest of the Task Manager), to inconsistent theming across applications, and a whole bog full of other minor quirks and issues, PCLOS is not a distribution that I would want to use or could recommend to friends.
We differ, but reasonable people differ.
