It's probably because I come off as a whiny bitch, which I do. Lol just frustrated.

I tried installing a VM but man it was really laggy. I used the open source one on linix, not virtualbox. I probably fucked something up, though.

Do you see the paradox here? You expect to be as proficient as you might be with something you've used your entire life with something you've only used on and off for a couple of months...

If you have newer hardware mint isnt what you wanna use. It is more stability focused. There are other distros that arr more geared towards faster updates and supporting new stuff faster.

Wasn't a fan of mint when I tried it. IMO, I found popOS to be an overall better experience when I first started using Linux and have since switched back to it after having a few issues on Fedora.

You might give that a shot especially if you are using nivida. PopOS hasn't given me much grief (aside from Gnome but that's more a personal distaste for it)

Even after being on Linux for a year and considering myself a fairly capable guy in tech, Linux is kind of a pain in the ass if you're doing more complicated things like in my case music production.

But it sounds like you've had an even worse go doing normal things which sucks. I feel for you man. I hope your next go is better.

It took me a few tries and Windows being a privacy nightmare to switch. It can be done but it wasn't (and still isnt) easy.

I use Pop!_OS and have had zero issues getting my Nvidia GPU to work on it, so that or a similar Linux distro that has good Nvidia driver support might be worth checking out.

I don't use Mint myself so I don't know how things are there. Thanks for clarifying.

Win10 works fine with secureboot off btw.

in the beginning I dual booted too and windows did cause some strange issues, but they disappeared when I disabled fast boot from somewhere in windows settings.

also I distrohop every now and then, and a I had trouble installing nvidia drivers a few times. on distros that earlier had no trouble at all with it. bluetooth works great on my pc, which was a pleasant surprise. I don't own a controller, but I heard that PS4 controllers work best.

all of your existing hardware may not be supported, but in the future you may want to search and check if the peripheral or component you are buying will play nice with linux if you want to move in that direction.

No prob, I hope running linux without "secure" boot is the fix you needed

lmao that's adorable.