This is a good laptop, still plenty fast for Linux. However, given the choice, use the Intel graphics card for your 2D desktop rendering, not the nvidia one. The nvidia drivers don't support it anymore, and the nouveau driver is too slow imho (visibly slow when moving windows etc). You can use old nvidia drivers for it, but these might be crashy with the new kernels. The Intel drivers will be fresh though.
I prefer Debian-Testing. Basically, a rolling release, but not unstable. Arch is akin to Debian -Sid, which is unstable. The latest packages are brought in to -Sid after some rudimentary testing on -experimental. But only the stuff that make it and are solid on -sid, make it to -testing. Basically, Debian has 2 layers of siphoning bugs before they even make it to -testing. And that's why the -stable branch is so solid, because whatever makes it there, has to go through the 3 branches.
So if you like rolling releases with much newer packages, consider -testing. The easiest way is to wait for the Trixie release, and then do the manual update to -testing by changing the repository names (there are online tutorials about it). The other way is to get a -testing iso, but these usually are broken because most people "upgrade" their installed distro to testing instead of just install it outright.
I've been using -testing for over a year now with 0 problems. Even Google is using -testing internally! I also have had Arch installed and endeavouros, and have had 3 problems that I had to fix in 5 months.
If it's AV1, you need both the hardware that can decode it, and the right libraries for it. x264 is not the same as AV1. AV1 requires lots of processing power, that's why you see the slow down. But with the right gfx card (and libs), it can decode it fine. What's your gfx card model exactly?
Exactly. The article says that 90% of hardware doesn't run on it, but in reality, 100% of hardware doesn't run on it. Only Qemu supports it, which is an emulator (and very slow to emulate RiscV in my experience -- latest version we tried with my husband on a very fast PC).
The Orange Pi RV2 was the perfect introductory Risc-V SBC, everyone is going gaga for it, for being a good middle of the road solution for those who want to try Risc-V, and yet, Ubuntu won't support it (and even the current implementation is done by the Chinese, not by Canonical, so I wouldn't touch it).
So I'm not sure what they're thinking. My own conspiracy theory is that EITHER Canonical, OR Raspberry Pi (which are close geographically), are preparing RV23 hardware, so they want to undercut the competition that way.
You think it's the screen/hdmi at fault, but it might not be. I've had the problem with two laptops in the past (the bug was with all distros I tried), and in one case it was a BIOS that Linux didn't like, and the second one was the internal wifi that its linux driver was buggy. For the first laptop there was nothing to be done, so I disabled sleep completely in the bios, while for the second one, I disabled the wifi modules in the kernel's blacklist, and then used a usb wifi that I knew it worked better. Both cases were appearing as a dead screen, but it wasn't the screen/hdmi/gfx card to blame. In yet another case, with a thinkpad laptop, the wake up was working, but it would wake up 30 seconds later than anticipated. In that case, it was the fact that its thunderbolt was dead (hardware had gone bad), and only when I disabled it in the bios completely the laptop would wake up correctly and fast.
In all those cases, I had to look at the kernel logs to see what was the issue. There were traces of the problem of which hardware exactly was creating the problem. It might look like a screen/hdmi problem, but most of the times, it's not.
Waking up from sleep is of course part graphics card/drivers, and BIOS code. My husband had his share with his nvidia card crashing the system when coming up from sleep under Wayland, but I believe these things have been mostly ironed now. However, if you have a buggy BIOS, you're out of luck. I've had such a DELL laptop, latest firmware installed, and no matter which distro I tried, it wouldn't wake up from sleep properly. So, if that's your issue, there's not much you can do, apart from getting compatible hardware. There are hardware lists of compatible hardware in some places, including archlinux's wiki i believe.
Honestly, if these laptops also have Intel gpus, just use these to do your 2D work. And if you feel adventurous, then install the 390 drivers as secondary, only for the apps that need computing (e.g. Blender). For anything else, just use Intel, they work great for both video and 2D desktop acceleration.
That's a rather expensive laptop you got there... I personally bought a used Thinkpad x280 for $160, and I run Linux on there. Another option is to get an small computer (sbc) with at least 8 gb of ram, if you already have a monitor.
There are several commercial options for Linux. The most-Ableton software out there is Bitwig Studio that has a Linux port. However, it's expensive. The cheapest commercial solution, with a bit of learning curve but powerful nonetheless, is Reaper.
However, if you want to go 100% open source, there's Ardour and LMMS (which is a lot like FL Studio). Ardour 9, which is expected by the end of the year, will be more MIDI-friendly than it used to be. LMMS latest git version (offered as binary on their site) has some good new features compared to their stable version, however, there's still no vst3 support.
I'm an visual artist and I used Photoshop for years to edit my hand-painted scanned paintings. When I moved to Linux, and Gimp3 was out, I was finally ready to leave Photoshop behind. Some features of Photoshop aren't there, but I was ready to leave them behind. Same with video, I used to have a rather popular blog about color grading with Resolve. I moved to kdenlive, which has none of these tools or plugins. It's a decision that I simply had to make. I wanted to use foss tools, and that was the price to pay. I'm cool with my decision.
If you gotta go commercial, go with Reaper. The people (a small team of 3 or 4 I believe) behind it are really cool, and they're doing it for the love of it, their profit is very small.
Ι'd suggest you try another kernel. This sounds like a kernel/driver issue, since the ssd seems to be healthy. Mint lets you pick from newer kernels, from within the update app. This might solve your issue, or you might want to upgrade to 22.1 too.
This is a good laptop, still plenty fast for Linux. However, given the choice, use the Intel graphics card for your 2D desktop rendering, not the nvidia one. The nvidia drivers don't support it anymore, and the nouveau driver is too slow imho (visibly slow when moving windows etc). You can use old nvidia drivers for it, but these might be crashy with the new kernels. The Intel drivers will be fresh though.