By not doing proper research. And "everyone" is a stretch. Had I been involves in suggesting a distro I would have asked what hardware they had.

Why do you need SecureBoot?

That's what atomic distros are for. Detecting problems at the development level, not the user level. Might give one of them a try. And get rid of the dual boot, that's just pain in the ass

Why does secure boot need to stay on?

Even so, you should be able to sign the drivers and use the boot shim if you really want to go through that process.

Thanks for the thoughtful response, and not chastising me like half the other people in this thread. Yes it's been very frustrating because I want to switch full time. I don't understand how I am having these issues on a reinstall of Linux, when my first install had none of these issues.

Thanks for the response

Kid, if you want proof, DM me an invite to a call somewhere you can screencast and I'll show you exactly what the issue is and fix it quickly. I'm that positive.

Linux Mint is NOT usable out of the box.

I set Mint up for my 65 year old mother about 4 years ago, and she hasn't had a single issue since. I think it's less about Mint being usable out of the box and more about Mint not doing what you want out of the box...

And you're missing the point: do your own research

I’m venting because I don’t understand how the experience is so vastly different for people.

It's always going to be a driver issue. It takes time and money to develop drivers for *nix, so most manufacturers don't bother. It's the most significant issue *nix has to deal with and if it wasn't an issue, no one would deal with Windows.

Basically everything you stated, Bluetooth, Controller and GPU is hardware.

Your experience is probably different since you still think and act like you use windows. This is normal. When you are used to something and then switch to something that works differently you will run into problems.

Dual boot with Windows. Dumb windows requires it

You can absolutely dual boot PopOS! and Windows. The only real issue you'll run into is Windows update is destructive--so you'll have to manually keep fixing systemd boot to ensure your PopOS! instance can continue to boot after Windows update.

I did a first install of mint months ago and daily drove it. I have gotten pretty used to Linux.

Bluetooth - Another nightmare. Bluetooth is terrible on Linux.

Shitty dongles is shittier in Linux, that's true. Never ever had a problem with Bluetooth on laptops.

None of my controllers work with Steam, no matter how many countless hours I’ve spent troubleshooting.

They work with games outside of Steam? If true is a Steam problem, not a Linux one. "But it works with Steam on Windows", well Valve can fuck up and introduce a bug on the Linux version.

Again, it's a driver issue. Has nothing to do with *nix. The manufacturer of the controller doesn't ensure that *nix distros have access to the driver. So how can it work?

Specifically which controller is it? Have you looked for *nix drivers specifically for that device? From the manufacturer?

Thats the thing. I've tried both xbox and ps5 controllers, and none are working. I test with jstest-gtk and whats weird is the right joystick shows it only moves up and down. Not sure if that's related, but it's weird

I think you are addressing the issues wrong.

Unsupported hardware is a reality in Linux, even if I didn't find any in the last 10+ years, my needs are much more limited.

Controllers do work just fine, as well as Bluetooth, in my experience. Maybe share some issues and let's see why.

Troubleshooting in Linux means understand why stuff don't work as you expect, not copypasta 50 different solutions. There are 50 solutions because there are 100 ways to do stuff and different distros and versions out there. The "unified" experience is from the windows world, not the Linux world.

Nvidia is a known issue on Linux, prrprietary drivers kind of sucks and there are no good open ones, at least for newish nvidia cards. But again, my experience with nvidia has always been very good, with proprietary drivers.

Steam, I used it trough wine to run windows games on Linux, with good success (1 game, so YMMV), and I found it amazing that it was even possible to do. But never used controllers

Honestly I am just going to try a reinstall and see if that works.

Bro. You need to grab for sanity right now. Switch back to windows until you're ready to take another dive. It's worth it imo, but a lot of these comments are just plane unhelpful. Linux is great, if it's not working for your hardware try a different tact.

Nvidia support just turned a corner at the end of last year. It's getting much much better.