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I was asking more specifically about the word "quality" itself than the whole sentence. Are you referring to stability? Security? User-friendliness? Integration with whatever? Hardware support? 'Cuz the word "quality" is way too broad a term to just use and not expect to piss off a lot of people. Lol.

That said, I can't disagree with you about, for instance, Plasma. (I haven't used Gnome enough to comment, but my last experience with Plasma back like 10 years ago wasn't great.)

I strongly prefer relatively minimal solutions. Rather than Plasma or Gnome, I use Sway, for instance. And it's solid as a rock. More so than either Plasma or Windows' graphical system in my experience.

Plasma, in my book, is way over-engineered. Windows too. And that's why they suck. And, admittedly, Plasma perhaps more so than Windows.

If I can find any common ground with you here, this is it: Microsoft has leverage on its employees to "fix" bugs in its over-engineered crap while KDE's over-engineered crap doesn't get fixed until volunteers can get to it.

But neither the Microsoft approach nor the KDE approach (nor, I'd guess, the Gnome approach) is a solution. You can't fix fundamental design flaws by heaping fixes on top. Sometimes you have to step back and decide it's best to finally rebuild the foundation. And Windows has a problem with almost never doing that. The Linux ecosystem is much better at that, I'd say. (And the argument could probably be made that that's the result of engineers just wanting to build something new and shiny rather than keep working on the boring old stuff. The result is working, though. Certainly in my estimation.) Look at Wayland, for instance. The only "innovations" I've seen from Windows is how they redesign their start menu and piss everyone off every couple of Windows versions.

And in the Linux ecosystem, I can throw away what I don't want and replace it with something I do want. I can't really replace any pieces of Windows.

I can't measure any of the above in dollars that went into Linux ecosystem vs dollars that went into Windows.