Some racing recommendations:

Midnight Club 3 Dub Edition

Enthusia

Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2 (the PS2 version is the best one)

Burnout 3 Takedown AND Revenge, both are stellar

Tokyo Extreme Racer 3 and Drift 2

The single player mode was decent. I like the career structure, it's something unique compared to most other racing games' checklists of events.

Driving physics were a minor improvement over Heat, which was already solid on that front (especially compared to the train wrecks of NFS '15 and Payback).

Contrary to most NFS fans, I wish they leaned more into the cartoon/anime aesthetic, something closer to Auto Modellista. I'm guessing EA didn't want to risk it though, so Unbound's aesthetic feels a little half-assed as a result.

Car customization is great as expected, Ghost nailed this in NFS '15 and basically copy/pasted the same system into everything since, which I'm fine with.

The multiplayer is live service garbage and I'm very disappointed that all post-launch updates have ignored the single player mode entirely... Or maybe I should be happy that they didn't incorporate live service garbage into the single player...

Overall, 7.5/10 if you ignore the multiplayer. It's Ghost's best game.

Minor update on this: I ended up returning the Samsung G80SD since it was being a finicky piece of shit in other ways and got an HP Omen Transcend 32 instead (I know, HP sucks, but I have nothing but good things to say about my HP Omen 27i so I took the chance). Same exact 3rd gen QD-OLED panel but this time it just works™. 240hz, VRR, all good out of the box.

So my point about the monitor is kind of moot, the G80SD just sucks, Linux is fine.

Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite Wifi7

I tend to avoid Gigabyte, but the only stock of 9800X3Ds available was in motherboard bundles on Newegg, so I ended up with it lol

I also noticed that Bluetooth still isn't working, so I am still waiting for 100% compatibility.

I game on Linux lol

is it even noticeable beyond 100hz when not gaming

Actually yes, honestly it's most noticeable when moving your mouse or dragging windows around. It's insanely smooth.

My old monitor was 165hz and I didn't expect the jump to be noticeable, but it actually was. It's definitely well beyond the point of diminishing returns (120 is fine imo), but it's still a nice upgrade.

For sure, if I was in the market for a laptop, System76, Tuxedo, and (while not exclusively Linux) Framework would be at the top of my list

For general PC hardware though, I've always been late to the party. I upgraded to Ryzen 3000 right before 5000 was coming out, so hardware support was already perfect on Linux. That's basically been my upgrade strategy for the past 10 years, so I've personally never really encountered these teething problems before now.

adding in support for end user hardware is an accident and requires extra effort on hardware makers' part who don't always rise to the challenge when they don't believe it's profitable enough for the effort; in which case, volunteers have to step in to fill the gap.

That's really the crux of the problem. How can we make companies care and/or better support volunteers to get patches out sooner.

I yearn for Fedora

When CPUs were a lot slower you could genuinely get noticeable performance improvements by compiling packages yourself, but nowadays the overhead from running pre-compiled binaries is negligible.

Hell, even Gentoo optionally offers binary packages now.

That's easy, just pick btrfs, gnome, pipewire, systemd, gdm, grub, and add flatpak in your additional packages.

Every other configuration is wrong.

/s

Now imagine the same meme but with Gentoo and LFS

Readable on Voyager as well.

EDIT: Not to say it looks good, but it's readable.

Pop_OS has fallen behind on updates over the past couple years with their development team focused on their Cosmic DE. I'm sure it'll catch up later, but Pop definitely isn't in a state I could recommend to anyone right now.

Mint is a very solid choice, but just to throw another idea out there if you're interested in out of the box Nvidia drivers, I've heard good things about Nobara. You can kind of think of it being to Fedora what Pop_OS was to Ubuntu. A solid base with some of the more finicky packages preinstalled.

Nice, waiting paid off. I'm actually interested in picking up the new God of War and Horizon games now.

Fedora/dnf makes installing additional desktops super easy, also with no risk to data. To hijack your comment a bit:

To install Plasma: sudo dnf install @kde-desktop

Logout and log into the Plasma session to use it.

To rollback, get the transaction ID of the above: dnf history list

And then rollback: sudo dnf history rollback <ID>

If Gnome's fonts/icons don't revert, install and open gnome-tweaks and reset settings.

Yeah if you're looking for a traditional/Windows-like metaphor, you're WAY better off with Plasma than trying to wrestle Gnome into that shape.

Definitely worth a try, especially if it's been a few years since you've last played with it.