I had quite the opposite experience. Middle of last year, reinstalled Mint on an HP Elitebook 8570w (everybody online seemed to recommend it over upgrading in-place like a normal operating system), and wanted to play games. Steam installed fine, but Mudrunner had to be configured to use Proton. Fair enough, but it crashed on startup. Okay, I’ll try an older version. Still crashes no matter what version I try (and I was on shitty vacation WiFi so downloading was extra slow mind you). Okay, I’ll try some random USE_WINE3D flag I found on the internet. No longer crashes, but the performance is piss slow. “Oh right”, I remembered, “I have to select the proprietary Nvidia drivers”. Fortunately Mint has a setting to easily select them, unfortunately after installing them the game crashes no matter what I do. Give up and go back to open source with 5fps. Try again later, and realize that apparently Mint installed the wrong Nvidia drivers, and I have to manually download them and install via the command line. Some more tweaking Proton versions and flags, and the game is finally running at a solid 20fps.

Compare that to my brother I was playing with. Identical 8570w laptop, identical Quadro K1000m CPU, identical Mudrunner game. The game worked out of the box and ran faster on his computer than it ever did on mine. I don’t remember the exact FPS but it was at least 30, probably closer to 45.

And before someone comments on “Nvidia”, I thought one of the benefits of Linux was supposed to be the ability to run on anything. Even the cheap laptop I got in 2017 because it was $250 but came with a 1080p screen and a graphics card. Paying more for the “correct” hardware would defeat the entire point of saving money with an open source operating system.