^This is the answer.

Mint still does not work well with Wayland from what I can tell, and if you need features like HDR, you’re gonna have to stick to something that runs Wayland well.

While Bazzite seems fine, it is an atomic distro. If you were to try installing certain software natively, like another Firewall for instance, it might not work. And if you continue to layer such software, the update times can take longer.

Cachy(with KDE) seems very stable to me. You’ll pretty much find every software through the repo. If not, you’ll have to manually install flatpak yourself. Never had to do it myself though. But it shouldn’t be a hassle, I think.

It has its own proton variant and they recommend that you disable Steam preshader caching and increase maximum shader cache size when you’re using Proton-Cachy or GE.

Added the overview now.

Pardon my ignorance, fellow Linux user. I just happened to mention the ones I heard of.

Will check these out and include them.

Thanks, fellow tux comrade.

Duly noted. Someone else also suggested this. Let me edit and include it in the original post.

I could have also pointed out some powershell scripts that help with debloating Windows, but I’ve also learned that Windows has been consistently trying to force bake Copilot into it, and eventually, it might be a slowly losing battle if not already the case.

It could be simplified with an overview at the beginning.

I should maybe have done the overview.

Format USB, burn iso, boot to usb, test, repeat if necessary

Exactly why Ventoy was suggested. To avoid repeating the formatting and burning ISO over and over again.

If they have already made the decision, no reason to list replacement programs

Oh, I see what you mean. I should have asked to skip to Step 2 after 1-A. Edited it now. Thanks.

you might get some better results if you dropped it into AI and asked for a summary.

Yeah, no, a lot of people don’t like slop.

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I dual boot Fedora KDE and Arch.

I’ve used Mint before and I’ve little to no qualms with it, but I wanted to move away from X-11, which has no GUI isolation. Hence the switch to Fedora, which has a smooth Wayland experience and also happens to have SELinux out-of-the-box.