Several months ago I posted about building a new PC for gaming and got some suggestions for Linux in there. Well I got some specs and ideas, saved up some more money, and pulled the trigger in January to buy. After building, I loaded with Windows 10 thinking I’d start with something I knew and was off to the races. I had a few bumps early on with driver management, but after sorting those out I was gaming on Steam for a while with no issues. Every so often I’d get crashes in game (to be fair, I was playing Fallout NV which is notorious for this), freezes, and automatic restarts. Well, about two weeks ago my computer updated to Windows 11 which was annoying, but since that what my work laptop runs I wasn’t too bothered. The next day when I pulled up a game, my sound wasn’t working. I was troubleshooting with my headphones, game settings, a different pair of Bluetooth earbuds, but nothing changed. I played around and realized sound was just broken across all of Windows, and apparently this is a common issue? Couldn’t watch videos, couldn’t even do a test tone in settings. So, I thought fuck it, this sucks and removes a big part of games for me so I loaded a USB with Linux Mint and partitioned a drive for it. I’m currently looking at Mint installing on my PC and waiting to get back into a mess-free experience.
I recently swapped to Mint and have been enjoying it. I still have Windows as my daily driver and I have a handful of things that I still need windows for, but I have a media center and a gaming PC set up both on mint. There was an odd quirk with Steam where it didn’t launch after some update, and it was a bit asinine to be honest. But after a few hours of research online I found the issue and modified a file so it loaded properly. Stuff like that sucks, but it gives me experience navigating the OS and understanding how it works.
To your point though, it overall just works. My wife uses it no problem and is getting use to where things are. I maintain the system though, ensuring updates are applied and searching for solutions when needed (for instance, we use caffeine to stop the monitor from going to sleep when playing games with a controller)