No problem, I wasn’t sure how I came off either, knowing how some of the community can sometimes respond to posts criticising Linux/ranting about real issues, I just thought I’d make sure and clarify my intent.
FWIW, I also hate the flatpak/snap trend btw…
Yes I do on my laptop (have not tried on my desktop which is connected to a standard monitor) + using an Xbox and an 8bitdo controller through Bluetooth.
Never had issues with hdmi audio passthrough, (but did use to have weird resolution issues, circa Ubuntu 10.04, on a particular TV that I never could solve).
I am not trying to negate your experience, or trying to assess sample size btw. I am just genuinely just as baffled as you seem to be, from the other end, and would like to know of potential issues I am not even aware of.
So you’re the person who got all my bugs so I could have none.
Jokes aside, the pipewire stuff in particular sounds painful, this is a rat’s nest I am very glad I have not had to touch.
Genuinely curious what the ton of extra configuration and controller issues you’ve encountered are? Speaking only for myself, since Proton it’s been pretty much smooth sailing, even with an Nvidia GPU.
Granted I don’t have more “niche” interests like VR or flight/driving sims which would require pretty specific “controllers” and may just have been lucky all around.
They appear on their own during compilation. Unsure whether setting it on fire yourself would speed up the warming phase though.
Compile Gentoo on an old machine and you won’t even need to mod.
For Mint and gaming specifically, somebody else would probably answer better but I can’t imagine it’s going to be too different from any other Linux distribution. If my memory serves me right, there are pretty easy to use utilities to install Nvidia proprietary drivers (which can often be the painpoint for people, though my experience has luckily been different). That being said, I do know a lot of people tend to advise Bazzite for gaming, so again, maybe someone more knowledgeable there could chime in.
For the more general question of gaming on Linux (irrelevant of the distribution), Steam has made things really easy for a lot of games. I have switched to Linux about 15 years ago and I can tell you it used to be a pita, but now with Proton, a lot of games “just work” TM. Unfortunately, some games do remain unplayable, in particular some multiplayer games which require kernel level anti cheats. You should check beforehand for the games you are interested in, but if something is truly unsupported that you want to play, Mint or no Mint, you’re shit out of luck.
My advice would be, if you have time for that, to back up your data (which you do anyways right?) and just give Mint a spin. You won’t brick your computer, worst case there is a showstopper and you can just reinstall windows. I am sure plenty of folks online would be happy to help in the process ;)
Mint is just so fucking great to get new users in, it’s also what I install on the machines of the poor souls who are still trapped in Microsoft’s hellscape and are open to the idea of trying another OS.
The Linux Mint devs are really doing awesome work.
I do hold my breath whenever I see nvidia-dkms in the list of pacman updates. It’s good to get some thrills, just to feel alive.
A new Linux user posting an anti Linux meme on a Linux community, on Lemmy. Well, I wish I had a tenth of your courage.
I do hope they go easy on you, brave soul.
Mandatory “I use arch btw…”
Oh yeah, I am forced to use it for work and it’s just incredible how innovative Microsoft is at making things worse. Takes real talent at that point.
This below is windows 11 consistency, within their own os context menus. I am not even starting on the fact that window decorations there too are a non standardised mess.
I agree that lack of UI consistency is less than ideal, and very real in Linux, but let’s not pretend that this is a main issue stopping people from migrating (from an equally inconsistent OS)
Had this specific issue a couple days ago, but, to make it worse, the up-to-date package was not yet available. So discord would straight up not start at all.
So, to add another tip: telling discord to shut up about updates is the only reasonable response to that bs in my opinion. I’ll update when I want to, thank you very much.
Just add "SKIP_HOST_UPDATE": true in the settings file at ~/.config/discord/settings.json to put this software in its place.
Haven’t used Debian in a while now, but back when I did, Wayland never did appear in the sessions dropdown on a fresh install with an nvidia card and nvidia proprietary drivers. Doing what is explained in the following link always worked for me though:
https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers#Wayland
Apologies if you have already tried this, but as I said, I’ve luckily not had to do more to get it to work, so hopefully it’s the same for you.
Funnily enough, I thought like you and was rocking Debian and various derivatives for years. Then one day, for some stupid reason (an out-of-date library for a side project in the Debian repo) and out of curiosity I tried arch.
Honestly have not looked back since for a bunch of reasons.
First, the package manager (pacman) is just awesome and extremely fast. I remember quickly ditching fedora in the past because, in part, of how goddamn slow dnf was.
Then, it’s actually much lower maintenance than I’d initially believed. I maybe had to repair something once after an update broke, and that was expected and documented so no problem there. Plus the rolling release model just makes it easier to update without having version jumps.
Talking of documentation, the wiki is really solid. It was a reference for me even before using arch anyways, so now it’s even better.
People also tend to value the customisability (it is indeed easier in a sense), the lack of bloat (like apps installed by default that you never use), and the AUR.
And, to be fair, a good share of people are probably also just memeing to death.
So I don’t know whether you’re missing something, it depends what you think Arch is like. If you believe it to be this monster of difficulty to install, where you essentially build your own system entirely etc etc… then yeah, you’re missing that it’s become much simpler than this. Otherwise if having more up-to-date software, easier ways to configure things and a rather minimal base install so you can choose exactly what you want on your system does not appeal to you, then likely arch is not going to be your thing.