As a side note: If you ever try again, I got SAI2 working on Zorin OS out of the box, while I just could not make any version of it work properly on Mint. As far as I know psp is out of the question, though. (And I am still stuck on Windows, since I have not yet found a way, to get the Surface Pro pen work well enough, on any distro.)

I just had a little chuckle that you are having a whine and that to get those apps running in linux you need WINE.

LLMs are really good at resolving all of these issues for you

That sounds like you ran into a few hardware issues, which may just be bad luck with your machine. Sure, Mint isn't for everyone or every machine. But the vast majority of people gave good luck with it.

Not sure what your opinions are on AI, but I would guess that a day or so using paid tier Claude would have you safely running some Linux distro on nearly any laptop. I used it to guide me through a home server setup that took a couple hours total. If you're worried about bricking the machine or want the SSD back, it's an easy way to get that, one way or another.

Trouble is, what can the OS makers offer these days?

Corporate OS makers like Apple and Microsoft?

Nothing.

The sad reality is we have hit the point where every OS for the last 15 years have been able to do everything necessary, and would still be able to do everything today if driver and security updates had continued.

Theres always the need to release a new product, from a corporate profiteering perspective, but there is no longer significant progress in the product itself. There is no revolutionary improvement like you saw from,(using windows as an example) say 3.11 to 95. or 98 to XP, or XP to 7.

Beyond that we've just kinda gotten minor iterative improvements(to be fair, we used to get iterative improvements as well bad then, with ME and Vista, as examples), along with a lot of creep and spyware because even the big OS makers realize that the OS as a viable, continuing product is coming to an end, and now they are shifting their attentions towards harvesting your data, tracking you, spying on you, and profiling you, so they can sell/lease/etc that data to others.

The only alternative to this corporate hellscape that exerts ownership over our OS and Computers is to use something like Linux.

and I know some people might cringe at hearing linux, because there are rabid proselytizers for linux, but as of this moment Linux is the only OS that for the most part lets you use modern computing without the creepware thats invaded modern paid-for OS's.

The ease of changing over to linux depends a lot on what you do, and may not be viable for everyone of course.

I didnt have many big headaches with XP. In fact, the only headache I recall having was getting some very old games working, but there were workarounds and eventually they ran fine.

Vista was only a nightmare because vista changed how drivers worked from all previous windows editions, which meant every old legacy device had to have new drivers made and signed for it, which caused major headaches for a lot of people not on the absolute latest and greatest, but that storm did eventually pass.. it should have passed in testing instead in public, which is partly why I didnt mention it, the other part being i never used it on a personal system, but Vista was ultimately a stopgap release due to delays with 7. basically a windows 6.5 if you will.

I agree, windows 7 was the best OS microsoft ever made.. maybe the best OS ever.

It was the peak, and microsoft could do nothing to improve on it..which is why every OS afterwards has relied on slop and creepware.