Enjoy I use mint 21.1 Victoria 21.1 xfce on my gaming laptop myself
Little tip make a second drive with a backup so that if it ever gets a bit to complicated you'll have something to come back to also you could duel boot as well if you need windows for work or smth although tbh I hardly have any issues with mint it normally works outside the box . Mints an all-round decent distro in my expirence
I also recommend you install neofetch onto your system when you do install Linux you can customise neofetch to look however you want you can also rice neofetch as well
I've been running Wayland for a while on my amd rig and haven't had any problems with xwayland in regards to compatibility. Nvidia on the other hand is problematic but the drivers seem to be improving with every release.
Steam decks have been out for years now, and even though they sold millions of copies they're not the majority of Linux machines, you can check the GPU AMD Custom GPU 0405 on the GPU field since that's the steam deck one, it's at 0.82% and had a 0.23% increase this month. So some of the increase in Linux came from it (around half), but there's still a lot of new Linux PC users.
Also it's worth mentioning that every time that the Linux share has gone down it coincides with a spike in Chinese language usage.
I was digging around on the steam hardware survey and it does list steam deck separately if you tell the hardware survey to only show you Linux, and it is ~5.5x more popular that arch, and also reports that arch and Ubuntu are similar, leading me to believe the steam deck is fully excluded from the default combined view.
If you take that x5.5 and use it to extrapolate, steam decks should have about 0.82% market share
I'm doing my part. Had a 2nd desktop worth of parts and put latest Ubuntu on it, trying out games that I have already installed on Windows. Once my game pass sub expires next year I'll probably fully switch over.
I'm genuinely concerned about https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky (wine for mac). If they make games run well on mac, there'll be less of a chance for mac users to want to switch to linux in order to game.
And when windows users get burned by windows 12, they'll most likely switch to a Mac if gaming works on it.
I don't think Mac uses will switch to Linux for playing games, they'd either use Windows or play whatever is available on macOS.
But yeah, if gaming on macOS ever gets close to gaming in Windows, I can see some Windows users moving to macOS. But honestly, I also see that as a good thing for Linux gaming since the lower Windows market share is, the more game devs need to cater to the smaller platforms. Also, Apple hardware is expensive enough and hardware limited enough that I don't see macOS ever really catering to high end gaming, so people who don't want Windows but do want a higher end gaming experience would flock to Linux. That said, I don't know how their SOCs compare to discrete GPUs, so I'm not sure where exactly that l line.
Given just how good apple's SOCs have gotten, more power to them if that's what they want. If they're willing to switch to apple they were never seriously interested in linux.in the first place
Who knows, maybe they'll all of a sudden decide to invest in that if Maccies find out they can play games, but are unsatisfied with the performance. Anything can happen.
I'll check out Tumbleweed. Any downsides to it compared to Ubuntu forks?
It has been a while, but nVidia drivers have always been a pain to install, especially when you also need an older version of CUDA. If tumbleweed has a better compatibility/easier installation process, it is a big win.
That take depends on what you need from Ubuntu 18.04. I'm not to familiar with how robotics stuff works, but perhaps a docker image would work? That way you can keep whatever libraries you need, and run it on whatever base OS you need. That said, I don't know how much of CUDA or whatever is in the driver vs the userland library, so I'm not sure if it would work.
As for distro, it doesn't matter as long as it's relatively decent. I recommend Linux Mint Debian edition, but I personally use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
I saw a question below about Tumbleweed, and you may want to look into OBS, which is OpenSUSE's way of building whatever libraries you need in a repo. So you'd basically find or build a recipe for your version of CUDA and install that alongside whatever else is in the system (assuming the Docker option doesn't work). If you're using a relatively popular stack, chances are someone has already gotten it working.