Stuck in KDE - Me of all people!

Most of you know how little time I have for kde, but as I was being bugged about the "full install" thing, I decided to try it, even if it meant installing kde.

So on a clean disk, I installed Current of 2024-04-20. I also installed the latest mate from slackware.uk. The good news is that all the polkit/elogind issues appear sorted. THE BAD NEWS is in the subject line - I'm stuck in kde. Things I tried:

• Pointing the /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc symlink at Mate instead of kde.
• Resorting to the desparate measure of reading the Slackware docs, which said to run xwmconfig. I also set that.

Now the nuclear option (removepkg kde*, rm -rf, that sort of thing) suggests itself, but if kde can be made to do what it's told and go away, I'll be happy for the moment. It must go away. Help, please.

That said, I must concede kde is not as gruesome as it has looked previously. I'll even concede it appears to have sped up a little over the days when everything seemed to be started from a 1 Meg bash script, loaded with pause & wait instructions. Maybe it's just that my box is better. But has to go - and quickly.