Lol. Because I got banned for saying how quick and painless my move to Mint was in response to a flatly incorrect meme. Bam! Banned just like that.

What problems are you seeing? To avoid getting your hopes up, this question is more about curiosity about what problems some users moving to Linux still face rather than volunteering tech support, though I wouldn't be surprised if you get some suggestions to solve your problems anyways.

I feel you. I also don't find the idea of tinkering with my PC all the time very pleasing, especially since I've got family. I picked openSUSE for the start and I'm happy with it after like 5 years? It's a bit "boring" diatro, isn't as hyped as Arch nor as rock solid as Debian, but it just works and I went it with because of snapper which is a lifesaver.

Yeah there's a tendency to not get that some of us are interested in Linux but prioritize boring. I'm using nobara (a gaming focused fork of fedora) and am loving how boring it is. It just works.

yeah there is sorta an issue I see in a lot of these types of things. You get people asking how a newb should get into something and people have these strange biases. I think in some cases its the folks that can't understand that people don't understand everything they understand. Or its just a particular religious like ferver around a philosophy. Like with biking you get folk who hate bike lanes and insist all biker should aggressively take the lane. I think I had another example of a group but it escapes me now. Anyway I do see a lot of folks pushing like arch and saying its way easy. I mean it is not as bad as it used to be but they don't get that someone wants to install and it to work without doing a single solitary additional thing. Zorin actually gets hate because it has a paid for version with support along with a community edition. I don't get that as its actually the oss model for making money and is how red hat got going. You don't really buy the software you buy support. Some see ubuntu and its respins in general as a sell out maybe because you can opt to have the non open source video drivers from nvidia. Anyway they do a disservice by pushing things that are not really set it and forget it. Like im doing bazzite now and if somone asks for a system that is good with gaming I will mention it but assume a gamer is willing to go to a bit greater lengths. The install requires you to get an iso particular to your hardware. Mainly video card. So its like one extra step and not quite as easy as installing windows. Some folks seem to not like it because steam is intalled by default which means it has proton which is why its great out of the box for gaming.

I play Valheim on Linux and have hosted a server before.

Easiest way is just to use R2 Mod Manager. It's available for Linux too. You just launch the game through it instead of Steam / wherever you launch it. I use PikaOS now which is based on Debian but had Bazzite in the past and it worked there too.

You do have to tell it where Steam / the game is installed though, but that's true of it even in Windows.

PS: fastest way to get help is probably venting/ saying something isn't working in a Linux community lol. It's a useful thing to know. That's how I sometimes get my answers too.

environment variables are a thing on windows as well. I grew up with windows and had to set environment variables for random stuff there as well. That is just a (depending on what you do) fairly normal thing. i hate to say it because obviously we all want people to switch to linux and have a good time and want to be helpful but … that’s just a skill issue

Well that would depend on what you use to run that mod manager, as that's probably a Windows application using wine (or proton, which is still based on wine). If you always just launch it from bash, .bashrc is the easiest. Launchers like Bottles or Steam will let you configure launch options per program/game. e.g ENVVAR=value %command% (%command% is a standin for the actual launch command, you leave that as is - it's necessary because you can add things both before and after the command)

But yes, overall, running Windows software is still the most annoying part of using Linux. At least usually for games run from Steam there's not much tinkering needed assuming the game works (so no kernel level anticheat games)