No, that’s Gnome, not Wayland. KDE still prefers SSD on Wayland.

I feel it has gotten much better in recent years. The first time I tried KDE 5 it looked weird to me. But now I acutally quite like KDE 6. Or maybe I’ve just learned to tolerate it…

What kind of issues did/do you encounter?

The VS Code/Codium essentially provide a separate development environment within the flatpak container. All the tools there, and the shell are separate from your actual system. There are some ways to work around this (https://github.com/flathub/com.vscodium.codium/blob/master/README.md). I gave up on the Flatpak and installed a native package. Containers are nice, but they have their limitations.

Sure, Bazzite has some nice features. But, I would argue that apart from the Nvidia images (there is no AMD image) those are all minor things. And for Nvidia cards, the Mint Driver Manager is pretty good. I don’t think any of those differences play a role here.

In general, I think it’s really unhelpful to present “switch to my favorite distro” as the first step in troubleshooting an issue.

Try CachyOS or Bazzite!

Bazzite, sure, but it’s not gonna magically solve these kind of issues.

However, if one is struggling as a beginner with Linux, I would strongly advise against switching to an Arch-based distro (CachyOS). Arch is great, but this is not its target audience.

I strongly disagree with u/brucethemoose here. You wrote below that you’re currently using Linux Mint, which is a great distro for beginners. In my opinion, Bazzite offers nothing essential that is not available on Mint. IMHO, the easiest ways to play games are:

• Use Steam to play your Steam games (native or using Proton). This should just work (on both distros)
• Use Heroic Games Launcher to play games from GOG, Epic, or non-store games. The recommendation is to install the Flatpak version, which is available on both distros. Afterwards, the setup step is to install a Proton-GE version before you can play your games (https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher/wiki/Linux-Quick-Start-Guide).

You can - of course - still switch to a different distro if you like, but this is not necessary or helpful to run games.

In the specs for the Laptop 13, it says:

Fingerprint Reader (2nd Gen)

Same for the 16, but not the 12.

Unfortunately, the former is not possible due to asinine requirements by the HDMI Forum: https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected The only option is to use DisplayPort instead (or perhaps an adapter).

One thing that comes to mind is that the 50series is only supperted by the open version of the proprietary Nvidia drivers. The closed version doesn’t support your new GPU, but would work with your old GPU. Do you know which version you installed?