I’ve been using Garuda for… Two or three years? I’ve done a lot of distro-hopping looking for something that won’t just break on me. I used Ubuntu for a long time but kept running into situations where it would break, such as boot loops. Eventually I settled on Garuda because it ships with newer software and Nvidia drivers, which is helpful because I use my PC for gaming. I have stuck around because it’s garuda-update command automatically makes a backup of your system out of the box, and you can select to boot into a backup in grub then restore it really easily. There have been a couple times where something has broken on an update, but when that happens I can immediately restore the backup, and I don’t even need to remember to run a backup manually. I do feel that the default theme is a bit gaudy so I swapped it to a default KDE, but other than that I’ve had pretty much only good experiences with Garuda.

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.