I’ve experienced far fewer bugs on KDE than Mint or Cinnamon, and I refuse to use GNOME. What else are you comparing against?

The issue is that GNOME is incredibly opinionated and makes it very difficult, if not impossible to configure some basic functionality that every other DE has options for. GNOME will work for you if you want a DE that works exactly the way stock GNOME works, but as soon as you want to change anything, you run into a brick wall. Nearly any other Linux DE can be configured to look and work similar to GNOME, but GNOME can’t be configured to work like anything other than the vanilla GNOME the devs insist you must use. It’s the antithesis of Linux IMO (modularity, reconfigurability, config-file-driven) and acts more like a MacOS skin.

I use node_exporter on all of my systems. They get scraped by a VictoriaMetrics instance on one of my servers, and then AlertManager is used to push out alerts if any of my configured thresholds are met (high temperature, high memory usage, high swap usage, high disk usage, etc.), and Grafana is used to plot it.

eg: CPU Temperatures, Drive Temperatures, RAM Usage, Disk Usage, and many more. Disk usage on that scale is pretty boring, but there’s a lot to see if you zoom out.

It records thousands of metrics from every system every 15 seconds and holds onto it for 6 months, so it’s easy to spot trends, look at historical changes, the differences caused by hardware changes, etc. I also use smart plugs which get pulled into the same database, so I can look at power consumption on all of the systems.

I’ll probably just install .1 and have a play then reinstall .2 from fresh and transfer my data.

There’s no need for that. X.1 -> X.2 is a minor upgrade, there’s no reason to wipe and reinstall for it.