I've had plenty of problems with Mint on my work laptop. For example:
* Regularly swapped itself into a screen freeze. Possibly because it defaulted the swap partition to 1 GB.
* Default boot partition was too small, so it ran out of space for new kernels. I have to manually remove kernels because the auto-remove is too slow to stay below the limit.
* Hibernate doesn't work out of the box. I managed to figure out that I have to install some other cryptically named package, otherwise `sudo pm-hibernate` fails without printing an error message. Then a distribution upgrade removed the required package from the repos. And that's just making the command line tool work, it doesn't add it to the power manager so it triggers automatically after an idle period or when closing the laptop lid.
I encountered similar issues on my gaming desktop running mint (e.g. the nvidia driver wouldn't load for no discernible reason) and steam deck.
Odd that you have partition woes, to me. That said, I have defaulted, for a long time, to not have fancy partition schemes. Where fancy is embarrassingly vague, of course; but the general idea is that extra partitions are largely solving problems from decades past. Worse, it leads to the swap and kernel space problems rather quickly. Though, swap into freezes is new to me.
Hibernate is one that I have heard a ton of troubles with. Largely with laptops. Good luck getting past it.
I am surprised you have had issues with the steam deck. That thing has been rock solid for me. Almost certainly my luck on the games I prefer.
Edit: I do want to underline my point about luck on my part. And good luck to you! I don't claim to have a panacea here. I also don't think it is some failing of anyone that some folks would stick with Windows or other.
* Regularly swapped itself into a screen freeze. Possibly because it defaulted the swap partition to 1 GB.
* Default boot partition was too small, so it ran out of space for new kernels. I have to manually remove kernels because the auto-remove is too slow to stay below the limit.
* Hibernate doesn't work out of the box. I managed to figure out that I have to install some other cryptically named package, otherwise `sudo pm-hibernate` fails without printing an error message. Then a distribution upgrade removed the required package from the repos. And that's just making the command line tool work, it doesn't add it to the power manager so it triggers automatically after an idle period or when closing the laptop lid.
I encountered similar issues on my gaming desktop running mint (e.g. the nvidia driver wouldn't load for no discernible reason) and steam deck.