I was pretty hesitant to switch away from a distro as solid and well regarded as Mint. It was a few throwaway responses to a comment I made on a game on Steam. "Try poops" said one. "Catchy is awesome" said another. It hadn't occurred to me that my distro was the possible cause of the issues I was facing with the game... But a switch to KDE showed me that there was a pretty impressive world outside Mint's "starter environment"...

Even though I'm on a development branch of kubuntu (by accident), it's been completely solid. I haven't returned to find the screen frozen, or the GPU hung, and I can Alt-Tab games and even leave them running when the screen blanks without them black-screening.

I do love Mint, and think it's a great starter distro, but I'm starting to really warm up to KDE. My only gripe is that starting steam from the start menu often fails (a known issue with .desktop files having multiple Exec= lines maybe?), and steam eventually unable to open subwindows, requiring me to close and reopen it. I don't know if that's a Steam or KDE issue, but it's only a minor annoyance compared to the enjoyment l smoothness of everything else.

A month and still going strong. Kubuntu is pretty good.