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.

    • huskypenguin@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      13 hours ago

      Yea and the purists are getting heated back. You’re obviously at a learning gap, and that’s the firmware gap. It’s annoying. But with older hardware it “just works”.

      I’m guessing since mint is Debian based it’s not getting the latest and greatest firmware blobs, or it’s on an older kernel.

      What’s your hardware? What version of Linux mint?

      You might want to try some gaming specific distros as they are a little more cutting edge. I’d suggest giving Bazzite or Nobara a try. Bazzite is immutable, so if it’s not working on first boot just give up and switch. But it is my personals favorite.

      Both are based on Fedora which is a little more cutting edge.

      You also might want to try Manjaro which is like Arch Linux with training wheels. It may just work on boot.

      Edit: Bazzite and Nobara will have Nvidia specific ISOs, so getting drivers working is no big deal. The core and legacy systems (Ubuntu, mint, Fedora, opensuse) all take a little more effort to get Nvidia working. Their spinoffs often times include the driver for you.