I don’t know how or why, but I get absolutely atrocious stuttering while playing games on X11 that simply doesn’t occur with Wayland, so X is just not an option for me.

I can’t speak for OP, but I remember reading about two years ago that Linux Mint is a poor choice for gaming because Cinnamon’s compositor can’t handle more fast-paced games (even just 60 FPS) and will reduce them to a stuttery mess even if the game’s otherwise running fine. I’m not sure if this is still the case, but I did deal with it back in late 2021.

There was also the stuff about Lutris developers abandoning their support for Mint (in a letter I feel was frankly way too harsh, rude and unprofessional) due to it doing some weird stuff with system packages that made the Lutris program generate weird bugs that couldn’t be replicated in other Ubuntu-derivative distributions. However, that can be circumvented by using the Lutris flatpak.

Honestly, I do hope those are no longer issues. I have a soft spot for Linux Mint since it was the first distro I daily-drove (and has a similar UI to Windows XP my beloved), and even though I don’t use it anymore, I still follow its development from time to time and I’d love to see it getting better and universally usable for everyone.

I am really glad Flatpak exists, it made using Linux much easier for me ^^

How’s FreeSO like? I’ve been somewhat interested in trying it out due to liking the idea of a multiplayer Sims game as well as the game’s old-timey graphics, but I’m not really sure how hard it is to get into it, or if it’s grindy to get enough resources to make a nice home and stuff like that.

Death of a Game is a great series, I was introduced to it by nerdSlayer’s video on Motor City Online (my beloved hyperfixation), and this one is just as good.

I use the Flatpak version of Firefox on Fedora Kinoite and it uses the KDE file picker without problems, I guess it’s an issue with the RPM version.

Besides speed, it’s also really useful for older games with unstable graphics renderers that don’t play nice with modern hardware. When I was still on Windows, I used DXVK on Fallout: New Vegas and Driver: Parallel Lines, and they decreased crashes by a LOT compared to when they ran on native DX9.

In terms of speed, obviously I didn’t notice much of a difference with D:PL since it’s a 2006 game that’s not demanding at all, but I did notice F:NV seemed to also run better and less laggy in general (not only is FNV poorly-optimized, but I also use a lot of graphics mods for it).

For everyday tasks, I think a Fedora distrobox works fine, but you would have to upgrade it eventually and I admit I’m not sure how you do that under distrobox. Still, I initially used it and still have a Fedora distrobox I use for doing stuff for my job, as well as one I use for running a game modding program that requires Java, and they both work fine.

I’ve also had success with a Debian distrobox, which I used to compile Render96ex. Debian is pretty universal, so it’s much easier to follow compile instructions using it than a Fedora distrobox ^^’