[GUIDE] Want to Game on Mint 21 Cinnamon? Start Here!

[Neigdoig]

For those who want a video guide and see me do it in real time, check the link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d5HG81WkDo

But for those who would like to read, here's what you do in order to game on Mint 21 Cinnamon. Note that some of the steps are from my Mint 20 Guide (viewtopic.php?f=42&t=381859); they can and/or will be applied here too.

1. The first thing to do is run

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   sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade -y

   to update and upgrade the packages on your system. Reboot once this is complete.

• Next, you head to the driver manager (if you have an Nvidia GPU) and download the proprietary drivers. You could theoretically test out the Open Kernel driver, but that takes a bit more work than you would want to do with it.

• Follow some of the techniques Chris Titus uses here: https://christitus.com/ultimate-linux-gaming-guide/. That way, you'll know what to do for most circumstances.

• Once you get to the Wine step on Titus' guide, follow the instructions to get WineHQ for Ubuntu Jammy LTS (which is on https://wiki.winehq.org/Ubuntu).

• Go into System Settings > Effects, and then turn "Desktop and window effects" to off, to save yourself some performance due to the compositor.

• You will need to use a text editor to edit /etc/default/grub. For this example, I will use

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  sudo nano /etc/default/grub

  Inside the file, you'll need to replace

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  GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=

  with

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  GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="rhgb quiet nvidia-drm.modeset=1 mitigations=off"

  to increase performance and load in the Nvidia drivers a bit faster (again, if you're on Nvidia. AMD users are not affected).

• After saving these edits, you'll need to run

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  sudo update-grub

  to save the changes made to your grub. Now, you should have the Arco Linux or Nobara looking screen when booting up again (which you will have to do after doing this).

After that, you're free to install whatever gaming software you desire and go ham with your basic optimized Mint 21 install. Any steps missed will go into an "Optional Steps" section on this post.

Extras:
Step 6: Thanks to this question, I forgot to mention what each thing does for the 6th step.

Firstly, RHGB is RedHat Graphical Boot, with the "quiet" command. It basically means not to display a splash screen.
nvidia-drm.modeset=1 is the command used to load the NVIDIA drivers faster, which I had mentioned. However, there had been a misunderstanding in this regard.
The idea of that command is that you load in the drivers faster, and you also get better performance this way, from what I had seen.
mitigations=off is the command used to turn off server mitigations, as the mitigations flag is essentially server mitigations.

[1000]

rhgb quiet nvidia-drm.modeset=1 mitigations=off

1. Could you describe in more detail what each parameter does?

2. I have doubts whether parameter rhgb works.
( Theoretically, the system logs should contain information whether it works if used. )
This looks like a "splash" parameter for me.
If I wanted performance, I wouldn't use this option.
But this is a matter of taste. Because this may be an intermediate solution.