Let me start by saying I think Linux Mint is one of the top 5 greatest distros of all time. It is an absolutely essential starting point for many people and their work is responsible for much of the user-friendliness you see in the world of Linux today. It is stable, has a nice aesthetic, “just works”, and doesn’t make you update constantly.
These things are great but they are the very things that make Linux Mint unsuited for online gaming. Is this a bad thing? No!! It’s just not a distro made for gaming purposes. It’s like showing up to a monster truck drag race in a Ferrari. I cannot count on my two hands how many times I have provided support to a user, to find their issue was outdated libraries due to using Linux Mint. It happens all the time. Go look at any game on ProtonDB that is currently working, and you’ll find 1-2 “not working” reports and they are always on either Debian on Mint.
I understand why we see it so often, because Linux Mint is awesome and users want to play their games on it. But if I suggested Hell Let Loose to a friend using Linux Mint right now, the first distro suggested for gaming in our FAQ, he wouldn’t be able to play because of his choice of distro. Making rolling distros look like a fortress in 2023 and suggesting Mint for gaming will only set new Linux users up for disappointment.
This isn’t totally. Here is where I disagree. Newer doesn’t always translate to better. I’ve written about my story where I spend 3 months testing and discovering a bug that affected the Arch Linux family, where I could not run Steam games. This was with a RX 6800XT that was purchased brand new in Dec. 2022. At the point of purchase the card/product line was 2 years beyond release. A single kernel update (v6.x) rendered Steam unusable and it did not matter which Mesa and LLVM version was installed. I went from Manjaro => EndeavourOS => Garuda => raw Arch and they all exhibited the same erroneous behavior. I was unable to get support from the communities for the above distros nor the greater Linux community so I was basically on my own testing and discovering the erroneous behavior, reporting back my findings in multiple forums. More than 20 other users reported that they encountered the same bug and were perplexed. I ended up testing both Mint/Cinnamon 21.1 and Pop_OS v22.04 and both were stable. They were running 5.x kernels and even after upgrading to the 6.0 and 6.01 kernels the installations and Steam remained stable without issues.
LTS releases aren’t necessarily inferior and rolling releases aren’t necessarily superior. There is greater nuance to them. The way that Linux is structured with loosely connected moving parts (AMD kernel driver, Mesa, LLVM, OpenGL/Vulkan) each can be updated independently this can be a strength. If one has bleeding edge hardware, I’ve learned to not expect plug-n-play right away. Linux support takes time (think in terms of many weeks to many months).