From the article, I wish them the best but this line of thinking is not the Linux way:

The first app I installed on Ubuntu (on both my machines) was Chrome browser. While Chromium, the open source version of the browser, is available in Ubuntu’s App Center (its app store), the official Google version is not.

If you’re wanting to give Linux a try, you gotta be willing to let go of the Windows way. Chrome is not better than chromium because Google. Don’t complain that a specific app is hard to get running if you aren’t willing to try the alternatives, especially if there’s literally a Linux version maintained by the same developer

Looks to me like Nobara might be what you want, it’s fedora based and is tailored toward gaming. I haven’t used it myself, so I can’t comment on how it’s different from fedora, but Fedora itself is pretty darn solid

What sort of “simple” things did you have trouble with in Mint?

You could try popOS, Fedora, or Ubuntu. But without knowing what you struggled with, Mint should still be the best choice of you’re new. Your troubles could just be the desktop environment you picked, or enabling third party/proprietary repositories. Or they could be a legit issue that is easily fixed using a different distro.

Drivers are on the computer, firmware is in the component. Firmware can be updated in both windows and Linux and will affect both systems. Drivers live solely on the OS, so fedora drivers will not be affecting windows. There’s an incredibly small chance that your firmware was updated and caused this, but I don’t recall a firmware update ever occurring automatically on Linux, I’ve always had to do it manually.

I remember my morning routine around 2007-2008 in college before Linux was usable enough for me was turn on laptop, make coffee and have breakfast. Once the clickety clack stopped, check email or something. If it was still clacking away, get ready to head to university and it would have to wait. While I had XP on that thing it did not leave the house unless I was planning to hit the library to write a paper or something that would take more than an hour. It was not worth it to go through the startup procedure between classes. I needed the charger wherever I took it because 20% was lost to either starting up or traveling while on.

Libreoffice, OpenOffice was abandoned when oracle bought it

I used both tumbleweed and leap for a bit and they really are good. I’m actually using tumbleweed on a home server right now and it’s been a champ. But…

1. My biggest gripe is opensuse seems to use different package names than any of the other distros for basic packages. I had to install a package that used capitals in the package name, and coming from mostly debian based distros, that made me rationally angry when trying to find the package I needed. I think it was network-manager or something that’s usually installed by default and I wanted something familiar.

2. Online directions for setting something up usually has deb and/or fedora rpm directions, which is usually just some difference in package names and the equivalent install command, searching the base package will let you figure it out. I had very few issues following debian/Ubuntu directions and translating them for fedora. Opensuse is always non-existent so you always need to translate those directions for opensuse, which is usually like doing it for fedora until you run into point (1).

I recall having a band like that, there were two or three removable sections closest to the watch on each side, those may have been removed already if they aren’t there.

You’d probably get better conversations at selfhosted I know some folks there run *bsd network appliances. NASs, firewalls, etc.

Jokes on you, I’m supposed to be doing stuff.

With my step kid I’ve basically just told him I’m not making anything else for him if he doesn’t like what I made. If he won’t eat it, he can have fresh vegetables and/or last night’s leftovers instead. I give him some options before I start cooking, so he knows and has some say in what dinner is.

The exception is if I make something that’s objectively gross. I’ve had a few frozen package dinners that looked good but were outright nasty and made sandwiches instead.