I disagree that stable distros aren’t good at general purpose gaming systems, they work fine unless you have very new hardware.

And sometimes the newer stuff csn bring more problems than a stable distro, depending on your hardware.

As an example, my system is an nvidia laptop with an external monitor. Unfortunately, the Nvidia driver is absolutely unusable under Wayland with this setup, which was a bummer for me, as I wanted to use Fedora with it, but starting with Fedora 41, X11 was completely phased out, so I couldn’t fall back to it.

I’m not a fan of openSUSE tumbleweed or Arch based distros, which do still support X11, which left me with the more Stable distros. Mint worked flawlessly with my setup, and I have no issue gaming.

Tl;dr there’s more nuance to stability vs bleeding edge, and both have their place.

Only issue with uBlue distros is the lack of documentation and limited help resources (many questions in the forum are left unanswered, as the uBlue team is quite small and likely can’t get to them all).

Eyyy! I see you got mint up and running, congrats dude! :D

But I guess my GPU is to «blame» for being too new

Unfortunately yes :(

The stable distros aren’t super good when it comes to the latest hardware, but but for slightly older stuff they’re pretty great.

I hope you succeed in getting mint into shape, though! :)

I tried both Bazzite and Fedora the past couple months, and this was my personal experience:

While Fedora does have a codec installing option in the installer now, it still doesn’t seem to include some common ones (couldn’t play certain formats until I installed the non-fedora flatpak VLC player).

Bazzite was very nice, though apps seemed a little slow to open. At some point all apps refused to open, which may have been my fault, but it was at that point that I noticed how incredibly sparse help documentation was, and how many questions (that were relevant to my issue) remained unanswered on the uBlue forum for months.

I think for a new user, access to good help documentation and resources is essential, so I currently don’t recommend it for newbies.

Hm, just to be sure, you’re trying sudo apt upgrade (not update) at the end?

A distro with newer stuff likely would work out of the box, though they tend to be a bit less new user friendly compared to Mint and Pop.

Fedora is generally recommended as the best compromise, but with it comes the need to use a third party repository called RPMFusion to get patent encumbered software like video codecs and steam. After it’s setup it’s usually smooth sailing, but something to bear in mind.

A non-lts version of Ubuntu should also work, as that’s more up to date.

If you’d like to troubleshoot pop a bit more, I believe a newer kernel should be available in your repository, 6.11 perhaps? (I’m not actually sure, I just know Linux Mint has it available). If it’s not available, you could grab the Xanmod kernel, which I recall being pretty easy to install, and is very up to date.

Since Pop OS is based on the LTS version of Ubuntu (long term support), it may lag behind a bit on having drivers for the very latest hardware. Mint is also based on Ubuntu LTS, which would explain why it didn’t work there either.

This guide shows how to use a PPA (basically like a mini repository with newer stuff back ported to work with the LTS) to upgrade to a newer Mesa version. Hopefully that gets you up and running!

What jumps out to me is that you mention installing a GPU driver, but most of the time with AMD cards you don’t have to mess with that as it uses the open source driver that comes with the distro.

How did you install this driver?

As your card is very new, it may benefit from a newer version of the MESA driver and a newer kernel.