I'm on Garuda right now but will probably go back to Zorin once I get some time to prepare the drive. Honestly, it was pretty good. I just ran into some problems with it and Steam, playing God of War in particular, and I just absolutely had to finish that game. It was working fine under Garuda, so I went back there.

I second Bottles. That program really works. I have Battle Brothers here and couldn't even get it to work with the Gog installer. Bottles ran it flawlessly.

I really haven't seen Bottles fail at anything.

Best of luck!

Be patient with yourself!

I'm new to linux as well and mint is awesome. If you like taking photos then I recommend the cheese app, gimp and krita are good if you want to work on illustration art or image manipulation. Also there are good native linux games here on gog like overload, transistor and shadow tactics.

I actually tried Heroic first, went to download Pathfinder - Kingmaker but it kept getting stuck at 23% for some reason, just grabbed the Linux copy direct and installed it normally afterwards.

oh ffs mate. give it a fuggin rest!

I think no matter what route you take it's going to take a few months to re-learn how to do ALL the things you are used to doing.

You can do all the same things, but it's going to be a different method. One suggestion would be to use the KDE Plasma desktop since it is very similar to Windows and will make the transition easier. It's also just a really great desktop.

Another suggestion (for gaming) is to get Steam setup. Even if you don't buy any games from Steam, you can use the client to easily run non-steam games. Eventually you probably will choose other methods, but for someone coming from Windows, Steam is probably the simplest way to run modern games well on Linux.

I should note, that since Heroic is just a glorified webpage in a box, (Electron, natch) it has all the flaws of being a webpage in a box.
I did worse, I also took an idle stab at the most popular desktop environment. I've got E16, Enlightenment, FVWM3, i3, IceWM, Luminia, LXQT, MATE, NsCDE, OpenBox, TDE, Windowmaker, XFCE, Plasma, Sway, progman, and Weston!

But I'd sooner uninstall Linux than deal with Gnome's arbitrary ivory tower decisions.

He's the very epitome of the Linux user stereotype: "My Linux is the best Linux! ... Windows and Mac OS are for sheep!" etc, etc.

About half of whats posted here is. :/
Then please, do everybody a fuggin favour already and move to some other shit you can gatekeep that does not get posted about here.

I use linux daily, be it on my flashed chromebook or remote access.

In my experience, programs don't just 'stop working'. I mean they can crash, i tend to have kTorrent or Pidgin crash sometimes, but that's never a big problem. But to suddenly stop working is weird.

You comment on updating, why are you updating? Once in a while after a major release, to add a feature you desperately want/need, or a major security bug fix, sure. But i don't bother with the nightly updates to programs to get the latest versions. If anything i'm still using the last ISO i downloaded something like 3 years ago and it works fine, except for the forced updating of Firefox ESR to make some sites work that i need.

In fact i keep specific versions of programs like Image Magick since i have scripts that work correctly based on certain outputs, and they change.

The only program i've ever had issues installing, was WINE, and that was after i uninstalled it, then there was some leftover tidbit preventing a proper install unless i did a clean wipe. (Thankfully not a machine that slowed me down at all).

I've also found using Mint and the other related ones that apt is a wonderful tool for just getting the software i care about up and running; Though i don't use that much so maybe that's a problem on my end. Being a programmer, GNU tools, DMD, notepad++ or Scite, a few optimizers like optipng jpegoptim, AdvanceCOMP compression tools, WINE (for those 2-3 programs i need), OpenOffice/LibreOffice and i'm good to go for the most part.

Are you completely switching over, or at least at first running Linux on the side?

I am a big proponent of dual-boot systems, running Windows and Linux side by side. Then any (hopefully temporary) hiccups on either side don't aggravate so much as you can always switch to the other side to do whatever you wanted to do. Especially if you are still trying to figure out the "right" distro for you. I probably did something wrong but I had hard time figuring out Bottles earlier when I tried it. Maybe I should retry it at some point with your instructions.

Frankly, I increasingly had the same feeling with Lutris. It is supposed to be a simple "click a button and it does everything for you, and just play", but I constantly ran into odd problems with it and couldn't get games running on it.

In the end it felt "easier" to set up Windows games to run on plain Wine myself, at least I knew (most of the time) what I was doing and usually had some idea what the problem was about, as there were no extra layers there muddling it.

Because that's how rolling release distros (Arch being a popular example) work.

You seem to be used to using point releases like Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/Fedora/Windows/MacOS.

Just popped in to say Bottles is great!

Is there a way to update to some interim level, and then to the latest versions, in order to tackle the problem you described, ie. the delta being too big as you haven't updated for ages, hence the update to the latest version fails?

I like the idea of rolling updates because generally I dislike the end-of-life (EOL) of point releases (unless the EOL is very far away, like with RHEL derivatives where the EOL is so far away that the computer where you are running it will probably die before that); I've too many times fought with failing release upgrades on Ubuntu (one time ending up with an unbootable system as the grub became broken somehow, had to use a backup to get back), or using some hacks to upgrade from a Centos release to another, or it being plainly stated you can't upgrade from an earlier Centos release to this one (then again Centos had the very long RHEL-lifecycle I mentioned above).

Or in the case of Mint, which is a derivative of Ubuntu, I think they clearly state that they don't recommend trying a release upgrade of Mint, but instead starting from a clean table when wanting to move to a newer Mint release.

(Even with Windows, I pretty much always start from a clean table e.g. when moving from Windows 7 to Windows 10, or Windows 10 to 11. I just feel it is safer that way, and not accidentally leaving ggiabytes of unneeded stuff lying on the hard drive from the earlier release, as a "backup").

But the problem is what you described: sometimes I may have an old Linux installation on some old laptop I haven't fired up for many many months, and certainly I'd like to be able to run the updates on it.

I did not describe a problem.