I’m sorry to hear you’ve had so much trouble with Linux. I understand the frustration that comes with Unix based OSes especially after being a heavy Windows user for years.

I did a bit of searching on your profile and saw you’re dual-booting with Windows on the same hard drive. I personally had issues with trying to set that up myself (Windows is a finicky, jealous b****). My own solution was installing my distro of choice onto a separate hard drive - if you can eventually do that I recommend it.

I know you’re getting a lot of flak for your post but it’s good to see honest opinions from people who genuinely want to try Linux but aren’t necessarily the same level of hyper-nerd as the typical demographic here.

Having information from a wider opinion pool will help in understanding how to get Linux to more of the population - but that’s a side tangent.

It’s encouraging to see that you are still open to trying in the future and taking a break from it can help you clear your head and come back with fresher eyes.

Unfortunately I don’t have much experience with NVIDIA drivers, and probably a similar amount of troubleshooting as Mint but I’ve found EndeavourOS to be friendlier to a middle-upper tech/gamer use case. Mint, for me, seemed cold and “office”-y and didn’t work well for me as I don’t only use my browser and word processor.

That said, distros are an almost ridiculously personal choice and part of that is trial and error. If you haven’t gotten the chance I recommend test driving a couple other distros in an Oracle VM (for user-friendliness) so you can decide what you like the feel of before committing to an install again, if and when you feel ready.

Good luck and godspeed until then.

I don’t have any advice for this exact problem but if it’s any consolation Firefox has randomly gotten offended at my video drivers and bricked my build. Multiple times. I use Librewolf when I can now.

That is hilarious though, sending frustrated IT vibes your way in both empathy and hopes it’ll help you reach the critical mass of superstition for the problem to fix itself before you have to threaten to take a hammer to it.

I deleted messenger once I finally convinced the people I give a shit about to switch over to safer platforms. Hadn’t posted on or touched FB in years at that point though. That also prompted me to move to Lemmy (my only real feed-based media consumption); that plus the constant influx of doomscrolling bullshit after the latest US election.

I don’t “use” Xitter and haven’t for many, many years aside from news for legitimate emergencies that had no other alternative. Stopped using IG after they tried to copy TikTok.

TL;DR: Enshitification + increasing threat to human rights

Far more positive and civil; people actually engage in their replies instead of the stream of recycled quips. Bad faith discussions usually get called out as such; less astroturfing.

Small-ish forums probably help with that too since users run in the same circles and there’s less overall “noise.” It’s also much more imperative to comment on posts since there may not be much engagement otherwise.