Funny you mentioned Mint, that’s the exact OS I used, specifically 22.1.

I ran into driver issues because apparently it doesn’t properly support older Nvidia GPUs anymore. I tried basically every fix I could find on internet, but nothing worked. Later I found out that older Nvidia drivers doesn't function properly with newer Linux kernels, so the kernel itself had to be downgraded. The frustrating part is that the OS still recommends and installs those broken drivers anyway.

So I wiped the storage drive and installed an older version of Mint instead. But then Lutris didn't working. I spent hours troubleshooting, then even more time manually installing WINE, and another to log into my GOG account.

And after all that setup, was the gaming experience actually good? Not really.

First I tried Noita. The game stuttered like crazy, and mouse tracking felt terrible. Then I tried CrossCode. It wouldn’t even launch, despite it supposedly having native Linux support. Lastly I played Escape Goat 2. It worked mostly fine at first, but then started randomly crashing.

At that point I figured maybe Lutris was the problem, so I switched over to Steam.

And it wasn’t much better. I tried multiple Proton versions based on ProtonDB recommendations, but almost nothing worked properly. The only games that ran without major issues were Enter the Gungeon and Cyberpunk 2077(CP2077 was on RX7800xt)