As an Xfce user I really don't mind saying that running KDE, especially the way you have things configured, really should not make that great a difference in terms of game performance.

If you really want to shave off as much CPU/GPU load as possible you would want to use a WM like Openbox or something rather than a full blown DE anyway, but even then the benefits are slight.

Can't comment on Manjaro though, as I am willing to piss around with my system enough to use Arch. ;)

Don't confuse Manjaro with Arch, it's derived from Arch, but it's not meant to be a quick-install Arch. For that, Antergos or ArchBang would be better suited.

That said, Manjaro is a fine distro. Both KDE and XFCE have LiveDVD versions, just give them a try and see how you like them. I know XFCE is supposed to use less resources, but let's face it, compared to modern games, DEs use nearly no resources at all. The difference will not be noticeable.

Out of curiosity, why are you leaving "the .deb world"?

I just want to try to see what else is out there. I really like Kubuntu and openSUSE for a lot of reasons, especially the stability I have had with both of them and their out of the box ease of use. I am really interested in the rolling release model though, and I figured a stable rolling release distribution might be worth investigating. From what I hear, Manjaro fits the bill. The whole systemd (which I have no real opinion on) commotion seems to be having a ripple down effect on all distributions based on Debian, I just don't know if it will be an issue with Kubuntu. Hence my curiosity to see what else may be out there.

If rolling-release pre-configured not-Debian is what you want, go ahead and install Manjaro, it will be awesome for you. (Or Sabayon if you want something based on Gentoo.) And of course, if you are a fan of KDE already, there's no real reason to not use it.

Thank you so much. I'm hesitant to try new things sometimes, so both of your opinions are well received. I'm downloading both XFCE and KDE versions of Manjaro right now. I tried Sabayon a few years ago after my brother suggested it (he's a Gentoo fanatic) and wasn't happy with it compared to what I was using then, openSUSE. I might try it again though, the time between various Linux versions is a curious thing. After installing an older hdd and gparting the hell out of my already massively partitioned system I'll give all 3 a try in VirtualBox. USB thumb drives at the ready!

My thoughts on Manjaro got soured when a random grub update decided to not let me boot anything, so I switched to Mint and have been mostly happy with it.

I loved Manjaro until the low latency prompting in the kernel started to cause my system to crash whenever I played a graphically intensive game. It may not have been the kernel directly but maybe a combination of that and my particular hardware setup..who knows? Either way I ended up going back to Ubuntu and have been really happy with it..............so far

Well... So far, so good. I tried Manjaro's XFCE, Plasma 4, and Plasma 5 beta and decided to stick with Plasma 4 on Manjaro. Everything is installing and running like butter. It was much easier to get the latest nVidia drivers working so I was very happy with that. Haven't played any games yet, but I'm downloading Empire: Total War (already owned it) through Steam right now so I hope to have that up and running when I wake up from a nap! Still have finger memory recall problems trying to apt-get everything but I'll learn. :)

You'll learn to swap apt-get install for pacman -s really soon. Happy you're liking your new setup. Almost makes me want to go distrohopping again.

Well I went back to Kubuntu after a weird problem arose with Manjaro.

I was having some weird problem with ALSA and the sound card I have. KDE kept wanting to turn it off and was suggesting that it was behaving like a removable drive. This is not an issue I ever had with Kubuntu or openSUSE with the same sound card. Having it do that once was ok, but it was an issue that arose several times a day. I need sound, this is not something I could live with.

After that problem started I would have certain icons not populate in the taskbar or on the desktop until I restarted the desktop or rebooted the system. Shortly thereafter I was losing icons in Dolphin as well. I don't know if it was an issue with certain updates, but I even reinstalled Manjaro once thinking I really screwed something up (which is most likely the case) but the same issues eventually came back. I eventually tried uninstalling software one package at a time in the reverse order that I could remember installing them to see if it was related to one thing or another, but I could never seem to pinpoint the issue.

Long story short, I have things to do other than troubleshoot my own system. The end of the year is the time when clients call the most and want to buy new hardware for tax purposes and I need to be able to dedicate my time to them. I went back to the 14.04 LTS Kubuntu distribution because I need to be up and running and stable. I'll probably throw my old system back together and play with it as a second computer with Manjaro installed at some point to see if I can replicate the problems, but for now I'll stick with what I know.

Distro-hopping cheers!

Edit: I did not install any different software that I had on Kubuntu or openSUSE. That is why I went back. It just seems odd. Maybe issues with a newer kernal or something? Who knows...