The Linux Experiment recently looked into touchscreen support of different desktop enviromenents. His findings mostly align with your comment. However, this seems to be one of the rare cases where the distro matters for Gnome. Upstream Gnome (e.g., as shipped by Fedora) works fine with touch screens, but support on Ubuntu Gnome appears to be quite broken.
The Linux Experiment videos:
Yeah, the “Nvidia (GTX 9xx-10xx Series)” should be the correct driver for your GPU. It seems that both desktop and notebook GPUs used the same architecture in this case.
I think the difference is that Bazzite chooses the open source Nvidia kernel driver for the newer GPUs. That one doesn’t support the GTX 900 series, so you’ll get the older proprietary kernel driver.
Upon switching, what should I expect to change?
Many things are very similar on Linux compared to Windows (e.g. Browsing, Steam). One big difference is that people prefer using package managers to install software (instead of downloading and installing it manually).
I’m considering Pop!_OS seeing as its praised for its compatibility and easy switching.
Pop!_OS is a nice distro and it should work well for you if you like the UI. There also many other good distros if you want to play around a bit. You can easily test them using a Live ISO.
What’s the situation with gaming look like? I know gaming on Linux has been a HIGHLY discussed topic for a while, is it easy to play any (non triple-A) steam game? I’m nowhere near involved in computer science, I’d just consider myself more stubborn than most end-users so I can persevere through some basic problems.
I’d say that you can expect almost all games to work. The main exception are games with anti-cheat that decide not to support Linux. In my case, there has only been one game in the last two years that didn’t work (War Thunder crashes a lot more than on Windows). Playing AAA games is generally not an issue. You can check https://www.protondb.com/ for specific games.
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)?
Upstream, the Fedora KDE Plasma edition is also doing well. Nice to see that within the first release after promotion to a full edition.