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 Outdated kernel can still cause incompatibility for other hardware, performance issues, incompatility with peripherals etc.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.
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.