> rock solid stable
Huh, actually, thanks to NVIDIA, the latest drivers are likely to make your Mint 18.x failing to boot (requiring safe mode in 4.4.53, uninstalling 38x.xx drivers, reinstalling 36x.xx, etc.) One word: PITA. The aforementioned manufacturer is apparently aware of the issue, has been for months, but they're not fixing poop.
So as it appears that Nvidia still is playing their sad stupid little proprietary game on Linux (Mint can't fix the issue)... sadly it is better/safer to stick to the big distros (Ubuntu, notably) if stability is your main concern.
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TLDR: PSA: too modified/exotic distros (like Mint+Cinnamon) are not well supported by some manufacturers, like Nvidia (nothing new under the sun, heh). Better use major ones (e.g. Ubuntu, main flavor will soon be Gnome 3 by 2018-04).
PS: No, I don't particularly like Ubuntu, but do we like Windows? Irrelevant, that's how we run Premiere Pro or previously .NET. Do we like macOS? Irrelevant, that's how we publish on iOS. Reality is what it is, and Ubuntu (vanilla/primary, as opposed to Ubuntu-based distros) is the chosen one for hardware support (usually, afaik).