I’ve been using Mint as my daily driver and gaming PC for years. Very happy with it.
If you’re really on the fence, and you’re building a new system, you might just want to “distro hop” for the first week or so. It’s a little work and a bit disruptive, as you’ll be re-installing the OS every few days. But just like a car, there’s nothing like actually driving it to get a feel for how much you’ll like it.
That, as others have mentioned, is a moderately difficult question for us without knowing what you like or what the specs on your laptop are.
If you install Steam, they have a pretty generous return policy. You just need to act within 2 weeks of the purchase OR before you hit a total of two hours played in that game - whichever comes first. I like Steam because the Proton compatibility layer built in makes gaming on Linux so incredibly easy.
I’m hesitant to do so because you undoubtedly like different things, but here is a short list of some of the games I’ve played that I really enjoyed based on total time played.
Sid Meier’s Civilization (the whole series is good, but 5 is my favorite)
Stellaris
Battletech
Satisfactory
Valheim
Football Manager (think of this title as the complex strategy game to FIFA’s action game)
Another vote being cast here for a both Brother and laser. The nice thing about laser is that you can go without printing for weeks, or even, months, and just pick up right where you left off. My old ink jets, if you left them that long, would have completely dried out and need to be replaced.
Clementine
If you liked Clementine, check out Strawberry. Clementine hasn’t been updated since 2016. Strawberry is a fork of the Clementine code base and essentially picks up where Clementine left off.
“continuing to push the boundaries of consent.”
If by “push the boundaries” you meant “completely ignore them”, then yes. This kind of behavior from MS, or any vendor, should always be considered strictly unacceptable.
As someone on Mastodon wisely pointed out: There aren’t enough Linux gamers to invest resources in supporting them properly, but there are enough using it to cheat to actively block them?