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KDE Plasma 5.15 Released (kde.org)
jrepin writes: Today, KDE launched Plasma 5.15, the first stable release of the popular desktop environment in 2019. For this release the Plasma team has focused on hunting down and removing all the paper cuts that slow you down. Plasma 5.15 brings a number of changes to the configuration interfaces, including more options for complex network configurations. Many icons have been added or redesigned to make them clearer. Integration with third-party technologies like GTK and Firefox has been improved substantially. Discover, Plasma's software and add-on installer, has received tons of improvements to help you stay up-to-date and find the tools you need to get your tasks done. For a more detailed list of features/changes, you can browse the full Plasma 5.15 changelog.
Long shot of it being the same problem, but I just finished tracking down something similar. Problem was I wasn't running a notification daemon, and pasystray was trying to send notifications on every volume change, which somehow managed to eventually jam up the entire environment for several minutes at a time (there are many things wrong with all of this..).
To me the default UI theme in Plasma these days looks far more like MacOS than Windows 8/10. Also there are plenty of Plasma themes (which use Qt themes to style the widgets) available to make the desktop look to your liking. Of course many Linux themes for Qt and GTK copy other platforms, but in general Windows clones aren't very popular.