Mint is great but from my own experience I'd stay away from the KDE version as I've had nothing but headaches with it for some reason. Your mileage may vary and all that.

That being said, I am running Mint 17.2 Cinnamon as my main OS on a 2 TB USB drive and I play all kinds of games like this and everything works just fine.

Unity on its own is enough of a difference for me :P

Well, the default setup has all these fancy effects turned on by default that when I play games and accidentally go to the upper left corner of the screen it does this weird mode where it shows all the windows at once and then resets my display to a very low resolution. I fixed that issue by turning off all the special effects.

Then later on, my desktop in KDE got screwed up where it looks like it got moved beyond my display range but my games play just fine. I have no idea how to describe this, it's something you would have to see with your own eyes.

Later on, I had weird WINE issues where the WINE window would act all kinds of screwy and would, for example, capture whatever was beneath it instead of actually working properly. I managed to fix this by playing around with the Winetricks script.

Also, even with all the bells and whistles in KDE turned off it still is a memory hog as opening Gwenview would take forever and a day, opening Update Manager would take forever and a day, opening the Software Manager or God help you the Driver Manager would take an eternity.

Keep in mind that I was using only the official Nvidia drivers and nothing open source as far as my display options are concerned.

I think it might be me but I have no idea as to just WHAT I am doing wrong when it comes to KDE but I have issues with it every time.

Mint 17.1 KDE uses KDE 4.14.https://www.kde.org/announcements/4.14/

Release notes for 17.1:

http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_rebecca_kde_whatsnew.php#kde

My issues with Mint KDE were present since version 17, though.

Quite frankly I am happy for now with Cinnamon. It doesn't have all that unnecessary, for me, special effects junk turned on and everything seems to load a LOT faster than on KDE again for me :D

All I know is that I've experienced headaches with it and the worst part is that I had no recourse as to how to fix things as I had no idea what to google for in order to fix my own issues. Hell, I have an easier time fixing errors with ./config or make not working than I do with weird operating system issues that occur seemingly at random.

In any case, I am just going to see how Cinnamon works out in the long run instead of wasting time with KDE for the time being :)

Yep, thank goodness there are version for those of us who just want a no-frills OS :)