You might really enjoy cinnamon! It is much more similar to KDE than Gnome. It is certainly a bit less polished than plasma but it does take a lot less getting used to.

I think I actually have a machine with Fedora KDE right now that has this problem (GTX 1050ti mobile)
Fortunately I have long switched to AMD on my desktop to avoid this issue.

In regards to that particular laptop, it has ran cinnamon many times (as well as gnome,) without issues. For your use cases it might actually be the perfect choice if it doesn't suffer from any freezes or crashes.