Ubuntu was my first Linux distro, If I remember correctly. Still have 12.04 on here, just never use it. It's probably so out of date, it would take an eon just to update it. I wonder how many months, or years
it's been since I cranked it up. Don't remember how many times I crashed Ubuntu. Might have done it, though. Don't remember for certain, but I seem to remember doing it.
I run KDE myself, and, compared to Gnome and Unity, I think I prefer it, to some degree. It's configurable. Gnome-- the newer one (3.x, I think)-- is kinda weird, and Unity is okay....
, but neither are configurable. Didn't really give gnome 3 much of a chance. Gnome 2 is alright
. I guess that is what Mint has, or had. Never tried Mint. I've done Ubuntu, Peppermint (only permanently on my Pentium 4), and OpenSuse. Only those 2 distros long term. I've played around with live cd's/flash drives of Xubuntu, Lubuntu, and Mageia. I've tried Xfce on Suse too. Haven't played with any of that stuff in a long time. I just run OpenSuse, and, for now, it works great.
The great thing about KDE is the configurability (besides the Windows-esqeness and the eye candy). I have a widget that can monitor the levels and/or activity of the CPU, Ram, Swap, Harddrive, and network, as well as CPU temperature (5 different readings at that!
).