What features were lacking from mesa or Cinnamon generally?
I have 4k 1440, 1080 monitor (120hz or higher) on Mint edge, what would I gain from switch to somethibg else?
mesa is outdated by default, not supporting rx 7000 cards unless you use the edge iso.
plasma has wayland support, tons of customizability, better multi monitor support, a great suite of applications including a text editor with lsp support and much more, and in general looks nicer. cinnamon is sort of the bare minimum
better multi monitor support
I run a 3x1 setup and KDE didn’t handle it any better than Cinnamon did.
Wayland support is coming to Mint. You can actually use it on 21.3 right now but it is unstable.
Rest of what you said is opinion.
Does that include support for variable refresh rate with multiple monitor (Freesync in my case).
Cinnamons compositor doesn’t turn off for games (it’s supposed to but has been bugged for years) which costs you fps.
Playing Alan Wake 2 at launch was only possible with the latest Mesa drivers compiled from the AUR due to some graphics features that it required.
I assume compiling Mesa is rather difficult to set up? For reference I’ve not bothered to try and compile Lutris or Wine.