stuner

Players can only access the lowest rank of competitive gameplay for free, and access to any higher levels costs a subscription fee of $2.50 a month. That's right, you'll need a subscription to play GeoGuessr on Steam, for some reason.

Not only is this price point bizarre for a game that you can literally just hop into similar browser versions and play for free, but [...]

GeoGuessr has required a subscription to actually play for a while now. I think they had a very limited Free tier until 2024, but it was not a great experience. The developers claim that they need to charge a subscription fee because they need to pay Google for the Streetview API access. To me, that seems plausible and would justify a subscription model (as opposed to a one-time purchase).

On the other hand, OpenGuessr seems to be a free alternative that offers a very similar game. That certainly seems like a better alternative if it's sustainable.

Upon switching, what should I expect to change?

Many things are very similar on Linux compared to Windows (e.g. Browsing, Steam). One big difference is that people prefer using package managers to install software (instead of downloading and installing it manually).

I’m considering Pop!_OS seeing as its praised for its compatibility and easy switching.

Pop!_OS is a nice distro and it should work well for you if you like the UI. There also many other good distros if you want to play around a bit. You can easily test them using a Live ISO.

What’s the situation with gaming look like? I know gaming on Linux has been a HIGHLY discussed topic for a while, is it easy to play any (non triple-A) steam game? I’m nowhere near involved in computer science, I’d just consider myself more stubborn than most end-users so I can persevere through some basic problems.

I'd say that you can expect almost all games to work. The main exception are games with anti-cheat that decide not to support Linux. In my case, there has only been one game in the last two years that didn't work (War Thunder crashes a lot more than on Windows). Playing AAA games is generally not an issue. You can check https://www.protondb.com/ for specific games.

Did you do anything special during setup? I couldn’t find many reports specific to this card on ProtonDB, but lots of people were using different Proton versions that weren’t available on Steam so wasn’t sure if that was it.

For me, it defaulted to Proton Experimental. It worked fine so I haven't changed it. But I can test 9.0 later. At some point I added "--launcher-skip" to skip the launcher, but it was also stable before that.

I'm running the flatpak version of Steam. Maybe you could try switching between the native and flatpak versions of Stream?

I'm also using the default Mint 6.8 kernel. Assuming that you are using the same, you could try switching to the newer HWE kernel.

Honestly, those two already kind-of feel like grasping at straws, but this one is even weirder (I'm only posting it because we both have AMD B650 mainboards): When I first switched to Linux, I noticed that I had a lot more weird crashes than on Windows. Eventually, I got a sufficiently specific error message (dxgi_error_device_reset I think) that led me to a workaround: After I switched the GPU PCIe Gen Mode to Gen4 in the BIOS the crashes were gone. I think the same issue occured on Windows too, but it somehow manages to recover from it. I would be surprised if you have the same issue, but I guess it doesn't hurt trying.

An easy option to limit the GPU power on Nvidia cards is GreenWithEnvy.

Not sure what else it could be... For me it's running fine on an RTX 3080 on Mint with the 570 driver... ProtonDB also doesn't seem to have any relevant reports for the RTX 40 series...

Like many others here, I think the most likely explanation here is that you did not fully shut down Windows and it still holds a lock on this partition. You can force an actual shutdown in Windows by shift-clicking on the start button -> shutdown.

However, I would also recommend against sharing your Steam library between Linux and Windows. I also tried this with NTFS a few years ago and it caused me a lot of headaches. I had a lot of weird issues under Linux that went away after I finally switched to ext4.

It’s the unofficial updater for nVidia graphics on Linux. If you’re running Mint you should use the Driver Manager software instead, imo

The PPA just provides the packages, you can actually install them through the Driver Manager after adding the PPA. However, without the PPA, the newest available version seems to be 550, which is not new enough for a 50-series GPU.

It's an unofficial repository (PPA) for Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu and Mint: https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

If you add "ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa" in "Software Sources", you'll be able to install newer driver versions in the "Driver Manager". For a 50-series GPU, you'll want at least version 570 IIRC.

I think those should be fine with Mint 22. You'll just need to use the graphics-driver-ppa to get an up-to-date Nvidia driver.

So, it's basically up to you if you want to play around with another distro or not. But tbh it sounds like Mint is a good fit for you.

What are the specs of your new computer? Mint can struggle with brand-new hardware (e.g. new GPUs from AMD/Intel). Or did you purchase a new PC that officially supports Linux (Mint)?

True, Linux applications (e.g. apt, dnf, pip, but also rm, sudo, and many more) would be more precise.

For Arch, it's probably not so easy to define "essential" packages, as it, for example, supports many different bootloaders. It is of course also a question of distro philosophy and target audience. Personally, I've noticed that "rm -r" as root prompts for every file on RHEL but does not on Arch...

E: Removing essential system-critical packages is not permitted. This might break the system.

You can still do it if you really want, but even Linux rightly has some protections against breaking your system.

I'd say Mint is fine for gaming, as long as your hardware is supported. I'm using it with an Nvidia GPU on X11 and I can play all the games I want to play (Steam is Steam after all). My main gripe is that multi-monitor VRR doesn't work on X11, but it hasn't pushed me to another distro just yet...

For people/beginners that mostly want to game on a computer, I'd say that actually something "immutable" like Bazzite might be one of the best options.