I've seen many posts over the years of the form
"What's the best or your favorite kde distribution"?

I'd like to take a step back and ask by what criteria makes a kde distribution the best or your favorite?

Off the top of my head, how do things like

* stability
* rate of kde-related updates (ie, are the latest kde releases available)
(note these first two are often at odds with each other)
* general distro familiarity (e.g. I've used distro X for like... forever)
* artwork/branding
* vanilla vs customization/integration

rate with you?

*repositories - large selection of apps and current versions of them
*community - when I need help large communities have higher possibilities of having experienced similar and they must be friendly (some are rumored to not be)
*gnome and kde de's as I like variety and there's still 1 or 2 gnome apps kde4 can't touch (i.e. fileroller)
*codecs, don't have to be standard but must be readily available
*current, I want it to be updated at least yearly
*large developer base, I don't want a distro that is a small group of developers that may decide to stop developing
*corporate backing and support, I think there's comfort in using those (see longevity)
*64bit

Idem as above and....

* highly configurable
* great apps such as Amarok, Dolphin, K3b, digikam, Kmymoney, Ktorrent, Tellico, etc...
* current, I want it to be updated and this goes very well with Kubuntu's ppa's

Ease of use
Integration
Ease of customisation
Consistency in interface between applications

*Stable
*fast
*lightweight

IMO Arch ROCKS in KDEmod...

One word: Manjaro

The only thing buggin' me about it is the branding is a little too much in some places. There is a page in Konqueror (like a MS Windows My Computer replica) at sysinfo://, and for some reason, the people at Manjaro decided to replace the head banner with the uglyist green color I've ever seen (not the same as their primary brand color, lighter and more like the color that makes me think of slime).

I think some branding is great for any distro (especially in KDE or Cinnamon which both have usefull graphic frontends for changing themes and such rather easily)... but branding to a point that forces users to sign up for the KDE forum (to figure out how to fix it) is unnecessary. OpenSUSE has some of the best KDE branding I've seen on any Linux distro, but the Arch base fits my personal needs, and I'm past the days of picking distros for branding alone.

KDE feels, to me, like the perfect suit for a bleeding edge, rolling release distribution. Where the office might require something plainer like Gnome to avoid overwhelming people (unless you wanted to overwhelm them with how cool Linux is, but usually work is more important), which suits more business-oriented releases like RHEL.