I;m still upset with Mint for doing away with KDE.. but they are doing what is best for their brand. Have been using Manjaro, but don’t like it... so I am planning on switching to Cinnamon :p
It is great for most people, but I prefer the control we have with KDE :(
If you like KDE, MX offers you a choice of KDE, Xfce4, and Fluxbox desktops.
I do prefer Mint. It is absolutely wonderful. As I said, I consider it the ultimate Windows replacement and better than Windows in many ways. But my two old computers run much better with MX then they do with 32-bit Mint. I saw it and ran benchmarks to verify it. MX has the same hardware support as Mint but it uses less memory, leaving more to run other things like browsers and applications. And, as nice as the Mint Cinnamon desktop is, the MX Xfce4 desktop is not very far behind.
I have a laptop and a desktop running Mint. I also have a laptop and a desktop running MX. I have tried both distros on all four machines. On the newer machines Mint is the better distro. But on the older, 32-bit machines with only 2Gb RAM there is no question that MX performs better.
We just can’t ignore the fact that Mint has said they will not be going forward with 32-bits. The most recent version was released just over a year ago. Mint pledges support for that version for two more years. But then it will go the way of Windows XP, a decent OS that can’t run browsers because Microsoft stopped updating it with the security features contemporary browsers require.