I’m playing through Dark Souls 2, and Horizon Zero Dawn. I’m really surprised how well horizon runs, although I’m capping the fps at 30 for a more stable experience. Balatro has also been a big one

That’s very fair. I say this only because I’ve found myself going down a rabbit hole of things not working on my own before, and a reinstall is usually the faster option for me. POP was just one example, a lot of distributions come with Nvidia installed by default. Mint should work pretty much out of the box, but I remember Optimus being tricky sometimes. I do not recommend Manjaro, and not because it’s arch. The last time I used Manjaro, it’s automatic updater updated my Nvidia driver and my kernel to two separate versions that didn’t work with each other, and bricked my system on me. It’s not exceptionally stable even as far as Arch goes. Arch doesn’t have to be scary, I use Garuda and it has made it very user friendly. I run all updates with one command and that command automatically makes snapper backups that I can pick between on boot, which makes fixing anything that can go wrong pretty easy. Garuda Cinnamon edition uses the same desktop that mint uses. Anyway, I do hope you’re able to get mint working for you.

Sometimes, the simplest option is to try a different distribution instead of messing with individual things that aren’t working on one. A lot of distributions come with the Nvidia drivers set up by default, such as POP OS. You could also try a fresh install of mint and install the Nvidia drivers using the driver manager application, and see if you’re getting the same results. As far as NTFS, that does have to change. You will keep running into problems if you don’t format them into something like ext4. When I first installed Linux, I had all my games on an NTFS drive and very few of them would work at all.

Installing applications can be done in a few ways, typically you’ll just download from your OS’s software store. Ubuntu does sometimes require that you add new repositories, but to avoid that you can always give something like flatpak or appimage versions of the software you want a try. Appimages are similar to .exe files, you can just download them from the software’s website - and you can get flatpak applications from flathub.org. The main downside with these is they come with all the stuff they depend on, so they tend to be a bigger file size, they can be a little slower but honestly it’s barely noticable. I rarely use appimages because they won’t show up in your desktop environment’s application list by default and it can be a pain to set them up to show. A good default way to go is Software store -> Flatpak -> Appimage -> then finally if none of that works you could do it manually, but I don’t recommend that. Ubuntu’s software store tends to be behind on updates because as a distribution it’s focused on stability. Once you’re used to it, there’s a lot of advantages to using a centralized software store instead of downloading .exe files off websites. Either way, don’t let some growing pains totally discourage you! Not every distribution provides the same experience, and there’s a lot of options out there!

The NVIDIA drivers are a constant source of problems compared to AMD. I’ve had updates completely break some games, so that if I want to play my whole library of games I have to alternate between driver versions.

Probably depends on the delivery service partner. They have slightly different hours from company to company.

You really haven’t established that that’s the case. Wherever you protest, you’re getting visibility and costing the state money to manage.

Not everyone can just ship themselves off to DC and like, shut down infrastructure. Let alone travel internationally. Being in a financial position where you can do that is an incredibly privileged position to be in. We have to do what we can, where we are to make change - and for people living in LA that means protesting in LA. A lot of protesting IS about visibility, and doing it so you can be noticed is far from pointless! Blocking traffic anywhere in this country is directly making sure that you and your message cannot be ignored.

What’s happening in Gaza is being directly funded by all of our taxes, there’s not a particular location that the protesting needs to be done, it just needs to be done.

I have a small windows install on a second SSD that I dual boot with. Most of my games work on Linux so I rarely have to boot over.

You have to buy an adapter to usb

Really unfortunate that Halo Infinite is getting kernel level anti-cheat.

I have earrings because I like the way they look. That’s really all I mean, earrings are sexy. I don’t really see how there’s an issue with expressing that.

Different people find different things attractive, as surprising as it is.