Both KDE Discover and Gnome Software offer similar functionality. You should also be able to use them without their respective shells.

I wanted to write the same thing. E.g., you can run this in bash to set the permissions for all .conf files to 600:

find /mnt/the/directory -iname "*.conf" -exec chmod 600 {} \;

Makes sense. But for an Arc B580 you’d probably want 6.12 or newer (according to https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-b580-gpu-compute). Unfortunately Linux Mint is not that great for running the very latest hardware (and especially GPUs).

Is there a particular reason that you want to update your kernel? Generally, the best idea as a new user is to stick with the default kernel that your distro provides What Stable Kernel Should I Use. Given your hardware, I’d expect that kernel 6.8 should work fine for you.

Linux Mint switched to the HWE kernel with version 22. Theferore, the kernel should be updated to 6.11 with the release of Ubuntu 24.04.2 (planned in a week).

Sorry to hear that Linux Mint is not working well for you. Unfortunately, things can sometimes still be rough when it comes to hardware support. I have personally also had issues with Nvidia GPUs and Bluetooth. Often this is because the manufacturers only provide drivers for Windows and Linux drivers need to be created by the community.

Regarding Nvidia and secure boot. I’ve had the same issue (on both Mint and other distros). After some frustrations (including a BIOS update) I finally gave up and disabled secure boot. Since then, I haven’t had any issues with my dual boot with Win 10 (but I probably won’t buy another Nvidia GPU). What makes you say that Windows requires Secure Boot?

No I didn’t. When I installed Linux mint the first time I was able to fix everything. I needed to reinstall it and that is where this controller issue started

This seems quite weird. Are you perhaps missing a package (e.g. steam-devices)?