Mint is up and running!
Thank you all who reached out, it really was awesome.
Was super easy, even my Nvidia cards driver was basically automated. Haven't played anything yet but I'm sure I'll be fine.
I opened up the command thingy a couple of times just to get some settings how I wanted them, but could have gotten by without it.
The biggest stumbling block for me personally was getting the thumb drive in order, then the hardware to boot from it. First you gotta use a thing called Rufus to format the drive correctly, not sure how or why, but you do.
And then I couldn't get my laptop to load bios no matter what key/s I mashed at restart, but searching " advanced startup options" in settings brought me to a menu to reboot from my (now correctly formatted) USB drive.
The rest drove itself. Still some stuff to figure out with it but it's doable. Very polished and user friendly.Thank you all again so much!
Most people just use a package manager the vast vast majority of time. People don’t typically compile from source or figure out different file types.
I did have to compile Wifi dongle driver, since I moved and didn't have cable in my work room. That was annoying as hell.
At first I thought I missed a driver in kernel compilation, but then my SO had the same issue in Mint. Luckily I was prepared.
But yeah, I have more sanity with Gentoo than I ever did with Windows. The other commenter probably hasn't used Linux or something.