I was you until about six months ago. KDE 3 got nearly everything right and instead of continuing to evolve, they pretty much threw it all away and went in a ra

I was you until about six months ago. KDE 3 got nearly everything right and instead of continuing to evolve, they pretty much threw it all away and went in a radical new direction, promising to revolutionize the Linux desktop. Note to aspiring developers: This is not how you keep users. Continually frustrated by the "opinionated" nature of GNOME, I kept trying KDE 4 and then 5 every few years, always hoping for the best, and already getting disappointed by stability issues, show-stopping usability bugs, or half-working implementations. It's like they just kept adding features but never bothered to test any of them. That changed recently. I gave one of the newer 5.x releases a try (on debian testing, if it matters) and have been very pleasantly surprised to see that all of my previous issues are just simply gone. I don't know what changed but they are certainly doing something right because the current releases are excellent. I would suggest giving KDE another try. I also feel like you will get a better experience by staying away from any distros that try to layer on their own tools and customizations like Mint and Kubuntu.