I had the same impression with Mint and it was the one my distro research led me to believe I would be the happiest with. I think my first mistake was using current generation parts for my build so I couldn’t get the GPU drivers to load or the monitor settings to detect properly. After troubleshooting for several hours and totally breaking my system at least twice messing with xorg.conf, I updated the linux kernel and that finally fixed it. A week later I realized I was spending 2-3 hours of troubleshooting for every hour of gaming or basic use and I finally made the switch to Fedora 43 Workstation.
Now everything works like I needed it to and I have been installing what I want to use with no more hanging, crashing, or horrendous screen tearing since v-sync doesn’t seem to work very well on X11. My takeaway is that Mint is probably ideal for older hardware but it definitely was a chore to make it happy with an RX 9060 XT and newer stuff which isn’t supported by the default kernel. My use case was more gaming oriented so YMMV.
Yeah, thats Debian for you. Stable and reliable but to achieve that, perpetually late. For more recent hardware you want something Fedora or Arch based. Peronally I switched to Bazzite from Win. Wanted to see what the fuzz is about with immutable distros (and all the gaming stuff preinstalled was another Point). So far it has mostly been great. I just had to adjust to the immutable part. My tryst with Arch on my old hardware was less pleasant…
While the driver situation has become much better, it is always a good idea to check Linux compatibility of new hardware purchases to be on the safe side.
I had the same impression with Mint and it was the one my distro research led me to believe I would be the happiest with. I think my first mistake was using current generation parts for my build so I couldn’t get the GPU drivers to load or the monitor settings to detect properly. After troubleshooting for several hours and totally breaking my system at least twice messing with xorg.conf, I updated the linux kernel and that finally fixed it. A week later I realized I was spending 2-3 hours of troubleshooting for every hour of gaming or basic use and I finally made the switch to Fedora 43 Workstation.
Now everything works like I needed it to and I have been installing what I want to use with no more hanging, crashing, or horrendous screen tearing since v-sync doesn’t seem to work very well on X11. My takeaway is that Mint is probably ideal for older hardware but it definitely was a chore to make it happy with an RX 9060 XT and newer stuff which isn’t supported by the default kernel. My use case was more gaming oriented so YMMV.
Yeah, thats Debian for you. Stable and reliable but to achieve that, perpetually late. For more recent hardware you want something Fedora or Arch based. Peronally I switched to Bazzite from Win. Wanted to see what the fuzz is about with immutable distros (and all the gaming stuff preinstalled was another Point). So far it has mostly been great. I just had to adjust to the immutable part. My tryst with Arch on my old hardware was less pleasant…
While the driver situation has become much better, it is always a good idea to check Linux compatibility of new hardware purchases to be on the safe side.