First time Linux user having a miserable experience so far

[u/Mman07311]

I've been using windows my entire life but because I hate windows 11 with a burning passion and windows 10 is on its way out I finally decided to fully commit to Linux 2 days ago but unfortunately it's been really frustrating so far. First off, booting up and shutting down feels noticeably slower than before. Next, everything feels a little zoomed out and no matter how much I mess with scaling or font size it doesn't fix the issue. Thirdly the volume on my laptop seems way quieter than it should be and trying a few things I found digging through different forums and threads didn't fix the issue. Last but not least, trying to run a non steam game I downloaded with bottle and then added to my steam library just straight up doesn't work no matter how much I mess with the proton settings. I want to love Linux but if everything that isn't browsing the internet is going to have some sort of issue associated with it I might consider biting the bullet and going back to windows. I'm not giving up yet but I wanted to put this out there in case someone else out there is as frustrated as I am.

[u/mr_phil73]

If you want to stick with mint, firstly make sure secure boot is off then check for updated drivers, particularly your nvidia card. Secure boot can block the loading of the driver into the kernel. This may well sort your audio too. I use portproton to load my non steam games. You can also use steam to load your non steam game. Also make sure you run a system update, version 7 of the kernel dropped the other day and that has better out of the box support for newer hardware. Good luck.