I've also switched to Fedora Kinoite a little over a year ago after lots of issue-driven frantic distrohopping followed by me having temporarily given up on Linux, and it really stuck for me as well. Fedora Atomic is honestly really cool, and it's been more reliable than most other distros I tried (even Workstation itself!), and I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way ^^'
I can't speak for OP, but I remember reading about two years ago that Linux Mint is a poor choice for gaming because Cinnamon's compositor can't handle more fast-paced games (even just 60 FPS) and will reduce them to a stuttery mess even if the game's otherwise running fine. I'm not sure if this is still the case, but I did deal with it back in late 2021.
There was also the stuff about Lutris developers abandoning their support for Mint (in a letter I feel was frankly way too harsh, rude and unprofessional) due to it doing some weird stuff with system packages that made the Lutris program generate weird bugs that couldn't be replicated in other Ubuntu-derivative distributions. However, that can be circumvented by using the Lutris flatpak.
Honestly, I do hope those are no longer issues. I have a soft spot for Linux Mint since it was the first distro I daily-drove (and has a similar UI to Windows XP my beloved), and even though I don't use it anymore, I still follow its development from time to time and I'd love to see it getting better and universally usable for everyone.
How's FreeSO like? I've been somewhat interested in trying it out due to liking the idea of a multiplayer Sims game as well as the game's old-timey graphics, but I'm not really sure how hard it is to get into it, or if it's grindy to get enough resources to make a nice home and stuff like that.
Death of a Game is a great series, I was introduced to it by nerdSlayer's video on Motor City Online (my beloved hyperfixation), and this one is just as good.
Besides speed, it's also really useful for older games with unstable graphics renderers that don't play nice with modern hardware. When I was still on Windows, I used DXVK on Fallout: New Vegas and Driver: Parallel Lines, and they decreased crashes by a LOT compared to when they ran on native DX9.
In terms of speed, obviously I didn't notice much of a difference with D:PL since it's a 2006 game that's not demanding at all, but I did notice F:NV seemed to also run better and less laggy in general (not only is FNV poorly-optimized, but I also use a lot of graphics mods for it).
Ahh I see, thanks for clarifying. It seems that where I live mostly only has the older Realtek chips for sale, so I likely mostly had bad luck.
I tried USB tethering, but it wouldn't work for some reason... I don't remember exactly what happened, but I think either the phone or my computer couldn't detect each other.
I can absolutely confirm it's still valid for Realtek. I had one using the RTL8812AU chipset that basically no kernel version nor distro provided out of the box, so I constantly had to download a third-party driver from Github and manually patch it via dkms, or use a third-party repository containing the driver package... and then the driver broke so badly that it wouldn't let me update at all unless I uninstalled it, which left me without the internet I needed to actually update, effectively leaving me unable to update until I could buy another one from Mediatek that's compatible.
And said Mediatek wifi is really slow, so I just went from the frying pan into the fire...
Sounds about right, I had nothing but bad experiences with Nvidia on Linux.
My experiences with AMD are far from perfect and I still have some bizarre issues nobody else has , but it was still a pretty big improvement.