alt Hacker NewsKDE Connect is over 10 years old by now. Hardly new. I also think it's sort of an extension of Apple's Messages app on MacOS, which let you send and receive messages through iMessage from a Mac, and thus pick up where you left of with your phone. That might be a stretch though, since KDE Connect and later Continuity does a lot more (although I'd be very surprised if Continuity wasn't viewed as that inside Apple at that time).
I'm also pretty sure the basic feature set you're mentioning, like clipboard and file sharing, using your phone to control your desktop, was part of the 1.0 release. Are there any features in KDE Connect that are new-ish?
That said, props to KDE for actually making a feature that hadn't been done before. But if KDE Connect is the most recent example of genuine improvements in the desktop experience that aren't just fixes, that goes to show that nobody's actually doing anything significant (in a good way) to the desktop experience.
KDE used to be terrible. However today, despite some grievances, it's probably the most polished modern Linux DE experience. Enough so that Valve chose it for SteamOS. I am also enjoying it on a Bazzite system.
I used xfce for pretty much my entire life because yes, there's been very little meaningful improvement to the DE experience in 25 years. Modern KDE finally convinced me to switch, and it does feel like a much more mature, refined experience than the shit show that was past KDE. It's also stable and fast. You should give it a spin!