Don’t get me wrong, Mint is a great distro and one of the best when starting with Linux, but Mint has only now started to support Wayland. And I know, Wayland has some issues but it’s the only way to use multi monitor setups that have different refresh rates and resolutions. For many gamers, this feature is a mininmal requirement.

  • smjsmokB
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    10 months ago

    Mint is fine, but there are some things you need to keep in mind.

    If you’re on AMD, then mesa matters and mesa from the repos will be outdated, which can cause problems with performance and compatibility (for example, many new games require recent mesa and sometimes even new GPUs need it to work). But this can be solved by having mesa from a PPA.

    On Nvidia, you just need the driver package to be up to date.

    Then there’s the kernel. Being LTS based, Mint doesn’t have a bleeding edge kernel by default and new kernels sometimes do introduce performance benefits (not always, though, but that’s a deeper topic for another discussion). Also recent hardware (new GPUs for example) might not work without a recent kernel. I’m not sure what the possibilities are here. I’ve seen people recommend the mainline utility for managing kernels on Mint, but I can’t comment on that personally because I’ve never used it. I use Mint on my laptop, but it’s not a gaming machine so I’m fine with the stock kernel there.

    If you take care of these things, Mint can be a really solid “gaming distro”. (+ you obviously want to have Proton, Wine etc. up to date but that’s true for all distros)