Let me start by saying I think Linux Mint is one of the top 5 greatest distros of all time. It is an absolutely essential starting point for many people and their work is responsible for much of the user-friendliness you see in the world of Linux today. It is stable, has a nice aesthetic, “just works”, and doesn’t make you update constantly.
These things are great but they are the very things that make Linux Mint unsuited for online gaming. Is this a bad thing? No!! It’s just not a distro made for gaming purposes. It’s like showing up to a monster truck drag race in a Ferrari. I cannot count on my two hands how many times I have provided support to a user, to find their issue was outdated libraries due to using Linux Mint. It happens all the time. Go look at any game on ProtonDB that is currently working, and you’ll find 1-2 “not working” reports and they are always on either Debian on Mint.
I understand why we see it so often, because Linux Mint is awesome and users want to play their games on it. But if I suggested Hell Let Loose to a friend using Linux Mint right now, the first distro suggested for gaming in our FAQ, he wouldn’t be able to play because of his choice of distro. Making rolling distros look like a fortress in 2023 and suggesting Mint for gaming will only set new Linux users up for disappointment.
If you have ancient version of Wine, it might cause problems.
On Mint, I almost don’t use Flatpacks because the experience sucks. You have your distro and it’s package manager, plus you need to have half of the system duplicated as flatpacks for any GUI application to work properly. I’ve encountered incorrectly set permissions on flatpacks so the basic functionality of software didn’t work. Most Linux developers learned to publish for package managers, it’s changing and people are slowly discovering Flatpack, but most Flatpack packages are (hopefully) maintained by some random dude, not by creators of the software and sometimes it’s packaged poorly.
Steam luckily manages versions of the proton for itself, but it still uses system libraries if it’s running in native mode. You can use steam runtime, which keeps separate version of each library, but I’m not sure which option is the default.
Then there is kernel and drivers. Luckily Mint has tools to update to newest GPU drivers, but that’s it. Outdated kernel can still cause incompatibility for other hardware, performance issues, incompatility with peripherals etc.
And that’s just the technical stuff not concerning user-friendliness. On Mint, you have to install lots of tools manually (utility to control GPU, fan control, steam, wine, whatever controls RGB on Linux, display calibration, mouse configuration…). Most users don’t even know what they should be looking for. I know Linux, but I didn’t know there is community software to control fans and wattage for Nvidia GPUs and lots of other software. Mint does lots of hand-holding, but it’s not targeted at gamers.