I would never have thought about hardware support either, and that you can’t install a new kernel?
It’s not recommended and could break things, but in the end, Mint is just Ubuntu LTS with extras, so I’d think you could install a mainline kernel like this: Install the Latest Mainline Linux Kernel Version in Ubuntu
I recommend Mint everywhere, probably did it for your new build too without thinking of hardware compat.
It is indeed possible but discouraged to install mainline kernels, they have broken stuff in the past.
I think you recommended PopOS (which I don’t really want because of Gnome).
The great thing about Mint is that bit is very stable but thay comes at the process of recency. I had expected that an OS released in January 2025 would come with a newer Kernel, that was my mistake.
What about Debian SID? A friend has been using that at work for ages.
I thought about it, because I use debian on servers, and it is probably the distribution I know best.
But I have always steered clear of Sid, because I want something more stable usually.
Yeah I understand, but you can’t have your cake and eat it. Most people run Arch or derivatives nowadays on their gaming rigs…
I’d recommend Fedora, because it’s such a good balance of up-to-date kernel and reasonably stable, but that’s rpm-based.
IMHO stock debian is just too far away from upstream for non-server use.
Yeah, every distro has its problems I guess.
In Ubuntu it is the snaps and Canonical’s policies that I really don’t like too much.
Arch is too much work for me these days.
I have been eyeing Nobara and CachyOS.
So many distros, so little time. 
Ain’t that the truth.
If that’s an option, CachyOS would be a good choice I think.
Grrrr… I should have expected this.
Ubuntu is somehow just as bad, maybe worse.
It has the drivers, but of the three games that I tried not one runs. In Mint they ran very badly, here I only get a black screen / freeze with any version of Proton I use (first settings I try are those that protonDB users report as working).
Sorry to hear you’re off to such a rocky start 
Did you find any other users having the same issues? I always thought that Ubuntu and derivatives were okish for gaming (if you don’t mind the other stuff wrt Canonical).
Sadly not.
I fear the problem is my GPU (and/or its drivers).
Tomorrow I’ll boot up the Win11 partition, install Steam, and run some game to rule out the possibility of a hardware problem.
Found someone with the same problem (and a solution!)
Going to try that in Xubuntu tomorrow. Maybe it works.
Still researching other distros though.
OK that didn’t work for my Xubuntu 25.04, the repository isn’t even accepted by apt.
Maybe it works for the stable Ubuntu version.
But for now I have decided to try the CachyOS route.
Last night I compared several possible gaming distros which people keep mentioning, based on the info I could find.
CachyOS
Bazzite
Nobara
Garuda
PopOS
Manjaro
Arch
Fedora
Tumbleweed
CachyOS came out on top as a good compromise. The one thing I really don’t feel good about is that it is Arch based, because I am totally out of depth there. I don’t even know how to install packages in Arch so I hope I don’t have to spend a lot of time in the terminal.
If there is a Chuck’s Guide on Arch tools and structure I’d appreciate a link. 
Edit: LOL this is a good one:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Rosetta
I’m not sure how much you intend to shuffle the guts of your distro, but everyday stuff on Arch really shouldn’t concern you. I’m not an Arch user myself but I’ve at times ran VMs with Arch and CachyOS out of curiosity, and you don’t need a CS degree to do that. Of all distros, Arch is probably the one with the most useful documentation.
Agreed.
I have been using Manjaro (Arch based) for the last years and to me it feels the best desktop distro so far (been using mostly Ubuntu before that). The rolling release concept makes package management quite robust.
A friend just installed Arch, and what I heard was so smooth nowadays that I will probably go with that route if I ever install new distro again.
I have to add that I have not been gaming in Linux (I use dual boot Win11), but I would guess that Arch User Repositories (AUR) probably have all the software one possibly ever needs, so some exotic gaming requirements are probably well covered.
As an Arch newcomer, this will save you some confusion.
Update the arch-keyring first:
pacman -S arch-keyring
Now update the rest:
pacman -Syu
This will make sure you don’t get any questions about new keys of maintainers while installing new versions of their packages.
Like “Do you trust this key? xyz” [y/N/maybe]
Installing CachyOS now.
With Xfce for now, although KDE Plasma looks nice.
Ok, I got Steam and most basic stuff I need up and running, waiting for a download to finish right now. In the meantime here’s a question for the Arch guys:
If I don’t have a software in the repository, but I have this:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/stellarium
What would I do to get that running?
Download the tarball, extract, install all the dependencies manually? Make it by hand?
Or is there a faster way? I could live with a binary from some repository or some halfway automated way of building.
I am really spoiled by Debian derivates…
If it’s in the AUR, you should be able to get it with pacman, AFAIK.
There are AUR helpers like:
pamac (common amongst Manjaro users)yay (popular)paru (another one)My experience is on the first one. Searches, downloads and builds the package automatically and also provides management for the AUR packages. I bet the other two work similarly.
As the name suggests the AUR are not official packages and should be treated as such. I usually read the latest comments on the AUR package web page and sometimes even peek in the pkg file.
I think the problem is that CachyOS, while compatible with and based on Arch, uses its own repositories. I’d have to add the standard Arch ones to have them in pacman, and I don’t know how that works either.
@UncleZam thx!