I've found Linux Mint way easier to use than Windows. I had to do a couple of google searches for a few things but it's really easy to install and setup and as for gaming i only had to install Lutris and Steam.

The only time i had to alter a games settings was when i had to enable DGVoodoo in the runner options for it to work.

I only play offline older games though.

I would say it kinda depends on the user and use case.

For the typical grandpa that only ckecks email, news and hobby videos, a distro like Linux Mint is easier and to a extend safer.

For the average "gamer" who cannot understand the concept of folders, Linux is big no-no. Many online games wont work, no access to Gamepass and the "distro fragmentation" making searching for a step by step tuturial a nightmare.

Grumpy old people like us on GOG that only uses the offline installers and little software as possible, I would say that Linux is actually easier for the most part. There's the trade off between Windows being Windows and Linux Mint requiring some more tweaking on some games, say correcting fullscreen.
Tools like Bottles or Lutris makes installing very easy and seamless, little more than 1 click process.

Power users and advanced users can use whaterver float their ship I guess.

Use Linux Mint Cinnamon or XCFE or something if your PC is more on the potato side.

or Fedora KDE Plasma. KDE Plasma is a more involved advanced desktop environment with lots of customization options. Mint stopped packaging KDE Plasma in

And just use Heroic to download and play your Gog, Epic games, and Amazon games and of course Steam for Steam games.

Some rare games do need some tweaking to get working. Or have (there is some updates I need to do, let you know latter how well they help) For example Shadow Empire required some adjustments to get working even on Steam.

Games with invasive kernel level anti-cheats are a problem, but kernel level anti-cheats is scary invasive-ness anyway

Heroic has a Discord channel where you can post help if you are getting a game working.

Most games will just work now and if you use the recommended installers installing and playing on these is no problem, especially if you use a AMD or Intel GPU. Nividia GPU might cause you some problems sometimes.

Also some games need to be run with Proton or Wine, even if they have a Linux native version. It;'s rare but happens.

Take Don't Starve Together. It stopped working with latter Linux versions. But it seems they stopped updating support for Linux. But I switched over to Windows version on Proton and it works fine again.

I have several games that won’t start on my gaming laptop, which has a 3050 Ti graphics card. I tried using the latest versions of Wine and Proton, but neither worked. Additionally, the latest Nvidia driver caused my system to freeze when I used the Heroic Games Launcher, and the only way to fix it was with a hard reset.

I’m considering trying Bazzite since I’ve heard it has better support for Nvidia and is specifically designed as a gaming OS. Edit: people are saying Mint been better for gaming than bazzit.
I actually agree with this because I find Linux Mint super easy to use. It just when thing don't work it's little frustrating.

How is sinit, ran into any issues? I think Vista got most of its bad rep due to faulty Nvidia drivers at the time.

It was good, but XP is my favorite.

AFAIK there is no magic distro that is capable of better or worse. Under the hood all Linux distros generally function the same. It's about the presets, the Desktop Environment etc. So rather than trying other distros, try other drivers.

Distros are basically packages of stuff. Of course this matters because these groupings need to be tested and designed to work together well. But video card behavior is related to drivers which works closer to the metal so to to speak. ( The distro on your DE might have some kind of animation or other thing that is tripping up your video card? Seems unlikely though but you never know.)

I might be wrong on this, but I don't think I am, at least for the most part/

Also did this laptop use to run Windows with no problem and then when you switched to Linux you got these crashes? If not, have you considered that the issue might not be software at all. Maybe some fault in the hardware, in the GPU, some issue with power management/PSU problems or heat? Maybe you could clean out your laptop. Laptops have to deal with heat alot more than desktops do since everything is packed in there and it takes alot less dust to gum up the limited airflow.

*edit in*
"latest Nvidia driver"
The proprietary driver or the novea however you spell it driver? Either way the "latest" driver may not be the best choice, you don't have the latest nivida GPU after all.

The laptop was functioning properly with Windows, and Linux Mint works well too. However, it seems to randomly lock up when using the Heroic Games Launcher during game installations or starting games. This issue did not happen when I was using my internal GPU.

I have already tested the hardware nothing came back bad.. I read that there could be issues with Nvidia GPU related to the Heroic Games Launcher. I also been monitoring the temps using Mangohud, which are normal. Reverting back to older Nvidia version seem to fixed the issue for now.

Once the game is running through HGL, it never locks up during gameplay.

Since I had begun using it in 2018, sinit has been fantastic (and stable, free of problems). I have been using it exclusively on a whole host of devices with various architectures (such as: x86_64, AArch64/ARM64, ARMhf, and RISCV64), and it feels great to be in complete control (and know that if something breaks, I only have myself to blame... and to rectify the issue). It might be a few mere levels above initializing the system with an interactive shell, but, I am deeply appreciative of its simplicity.

The main obstacle for many people seems to be the process of accepting that the principal duty of the sinit binary is to execute a single script and wait for the user to send a signal (which can be bound to a dwm key combination, or, executed through a customized dmenu script) to PID 1 (kill -s USR1 1 to power off or kill -s INT 1 to reboot). The aforementioned unified init/shutdown/reboot script is to be manually created by analyzing the initialization scripts supplied by a given Linux distribution and extracting the essential commands (and their arguments). Said instructions only need to be placed in the correct order within the script, with shell conditional statements isolating the init/shutdown/reboot sections (activated via first positional parameter following the executed script).

Taking all of the above into account, it is quite liberating to have certain commands set to run upon system start-up in whichever preferred order (with '/usr/bin/openvt -c 1 -- /usr/local/bin/login user' and '/usr/bin/Xorg :0 vt1 >/dev/null 2>&1 &' remaining as the final two). Manipulating just one file per machine (whether local or remote) elicits a sense of internal peace.

Syphon, the other thing you could try is different Linux kernels, the heart of the OS. Pretty easy to change kernels though you do need a reboot each time.

In october, when win10 ends his support life i will do dual boot in my laptop and install Mint. I am not going to buy a new laptop atm. I read win11 24h2 had been quite problems.

Yeah MS stopped delivering 24H2 to Windows 11 computers after it became evident it has broken quite many games, also new games on Steam etc. I don't know how many GOG games it may have broken, at least Demonicon stopped working due to the update (one of my Win11 laptops got the update before MS pulled it, and I didn't uninstall the update in time).

Just checked the status yesterday, still no update from MS why the update has broken many games and when we can expect a fix. Oh well, maybe one day... I wonder how many GOG games may have been affected by it, but not going to test it.

I guess now when someone reports a GOG game is not working for them, they should check whether they are using Windows 11 24H2.

I recently tried out Gnome again after not using it for several years and it is a horrendously broken/buggy clusterfuck. At least Gnome 47 was (which I think was the version I was on).

Back on KDE again.

There is also the X11 verses Wayland thing, but I lack enough knowledge to properly discuss that