Both of them cleared up the same way. I went into the font config. Changed the fonts to something else, changed it back, and now they work. With Konsole, I turned off the translucency, turned it back on and it worked.

Now as much as Gnome has been "simplified" so you don't have to mess with it, I'm one hour of keyboard time in using KDE and it's already close enough that I've stopped messing with it while I get other stuff done.

Very low-power system and the only delays I'm seeing are from the DSL, not the desktop. Shortcuts are mostly what I expected, the rest were relatively easy to find. (The one annoyance is it treats the window key as a modifier, so I can't get it to pop the main KDE menu by pressing just that.)

But in defense of the idea that people don't care about the desktop, all I care about is that it runs the apps I want. And so far it does that without getting in my way. I expect in the next couple of days I may tweak the settings a bit more, but then never touch them again.

The one exceptions is that there is a lot of stuff on the menu. Once I find the half-dozen or so that I mostly use, I'll probably dock them somewhere.