My time with Linux has been equal parts amazing and absolutely infuriating. Linux Mint is NOT usable out of the box. Here have been my issues:
Nvidia GPU - Trying to figure out how to get the drivers working was a nightmare with ten million different people giving different advice on how to get it to work. Eventually I was able to get them signed and it seems to work
Bluetooth - Another nightmare. Bluetooth is terrible on Linux. It took hours to get it even remotely working ok, but I still don’t think it’s perfect.
Compatibility - Some things just straight up don’t work for seemingly no reason. None of my controllers work with Steam, no matter how many countless hours I’ve spent troubleshooting.
And that is where I am disappointed. Troubleshooting Linux issues sucks. There are so many people giving their opinions and all of them are different and most don’t work.
When Linux is working right it is amazing, and I love it. But right now, it just isn’t as good as Windows and extremely infuriating more often than not. Guess I am going to switch back and give Bill Gates all of my info again. Really fucking disappointing
Update: Controllers seem to work after forcing compatibility mode in Steam. No idea why that was off or why Steam was essentially hijacking my controller, but it seems to work now. For everyone that helped thank you.
Those are not normal problems. Linux generally does work out of the box unless you’ve got weird or new hardware.
Mint usually does the trick ez peasy and that’s why it’s recommended so much. BUT, sometimes it craps on your hardware. I’d actually suggest trying a different distro before you make up your mind. Some are newer than mint and might work where mint doesn’t.
Might I suggest fedora workstation or popos? Fedora and the rpm fusion team make installing nvidia a breeze and it’s running pretty recent kernels and code. I’ve never run popos but it seems to be gaming focused and people generally like it.
If your having the same issues, then you probably do have some hardware incompatibilities. And if that’s the case, you have my condolences-you’d be better off just sticking with something that works - aka windows.
But please do believe me/us when I say you shouldn’t have to work that hard - mint is either too old, or you’ve got wonky hardware that is going to be a pain no matter what.
I appreciate the response. I fixed my current issue, but honestly I’m thinking off messing with other distros. We’ll see.