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 I cannot count on my two hands how many times I have provided support to a user, to find their issue was outdated libraries due to using Linux Mint.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.
Well, I use Arch, the one that Steam OS Is based on, and I have had problems, counted on one hand, but some are important, like a version of the AMD drivers not working properly after an update and people just saying that they are not good, either way steam should test against it before an update, or having problems with my ps5 controller in Linux native games when it works fine trough proton (this has nothing to do with the OS), something that I informed to the steam repo but there is no solution, if it works trough proton it should work in native, this one is important because of the Deck.
The point is that every OS will have problems, but yeah, I wouldn’t touch a system that uses PPA for gaming, they have failed too many times for me, specially when using a Nvidia card (since Nvidia forces the use of additional PPA)