*starts a to pounder about all those spare pc parts and how to put those to use

New to mint. does anybody know how to get mint to use my Radeon RX 7800 XT rather than the integrated graphics on the CPU because it blows up the CPU and i can't even get some old games to run Parkitect shuts right down because it needs a dedicated GPU.

Upgrade kernel, apparently.

Thank you for the help.

Even though l was up to date in the update manager - l found online l have to manually update the kernel for Mint. ln the update manager you have to do a search for kernel and update that way.

But everything ran smoothly after the kernal update and doing a little bit of testing on 4 different games that had not been running.

Or you could learn how apt-get works, it saves a lot of this faffing about in GUI products and tends to be faster. Plus, you get to learn what's updating, and decide to shoot what you don't need away. Why do I need 17 language files for a system where I might at most, know three? BLAM!

He could, but there is really no need to do that in Mint. The GUI provides all the necessary information and functionality to manage your kernels. From the upcoming version 22 onward point releases will come with the corresponding Ubuntu HWE-Kernel by default instead of the LTS-Kernel, so he doesn't even have to look for them manually.

I'm not trying to bash the terminal or anything but Mint specifically caters to those who aren't that keen on tinkering with their operating system...

I mean, if Mint is going to take steps to ensue that sanity prevails instead of backports, I guess I can live with that.

Hmm... Stability, basically not having major changes, and more assurances that things are tried and true and long tested was what made me look into Mint... Any newer stuff or any hint of a faster pace of updates makes the prospect of switching, which I of course keep putting off even really making plans for attempting, even scarier.
On the other hand, if I'll switch, it'll be because of getting a new computer, which will likely have current-gen hardware, so something like this may be necessary at first. But then I'd still want assurances that there will be basically no notable OS changes for the lifetime of that computer. And this one I'm currently using is 9 y/o, to give a sense of what that means...

Understandable. According to Mint, they went with the Ubuntu LTS Kernel for the very reason, that it is more stable and better testet. Yet in recent years, the HWE-Kernels have allegedly improved on that front and come with the benefit of supporting more up to date hardware as demonstrated above. For an OS that aims to work "out of the box" that is a considerable advantage. You will, of course, still be able to keep to older kernel if you wish to. On an older machine that is perfectly fine IMHO.

What's a HWE-kernel?

https://askubuntu.com/questions/248914/what-is-hardware-enablement-hwe

Thanks. Well I got my current computer five years ago and I fully intend to still be using it five or ten years from now. Until it's deader than dead. That shit won't make my computer faster or better, only slower. DON'T FIX WHAT'S NOT BROKEN.