As in tradition - mindset. Getting on Linux requires a certain mindset, and this gets more and more true the weirder and more involved whatever it is that you are planning to do gets.

+1 for everything you mentioned - I’ll add Stardew Valley. Flawless mod support with SMAPI on Linux. I do love my mods.

Stardew Valley and Minecraft modder reporting in with no issues. In general, anything Steam is moddable without issues.

(edit: as a preamble - I recommend against using Mint as a new user, since it leverages outdated technologies. Fedora uses newer tech that has a lot of rough edges from the past already smoothed out. But the following comment still applies.)

I’m a heavy Linux user who has dropped Windows but I agree. It’s fundamentally based on luck: a combination between your hardware configuration, the games you play and the software you use. Linux gaming is gaining popularity because for a lot of people it mostly just works, minus a couple papercuts that are tolerable, especially when you factor them against all the jank you left behind from Windows.

But if you get unlucky enough… as another person said, it’s death by a thousand papercuts. Or, like The Linux Experiment put it, a permanent state of 99% there. Things working, almost fine, but never quite perfect, and enough things being rough around the edges that it does put you off. I am going to be completely honest: the fact that Microsoft has been seemingly self-sabotaging the user experience they offer and murdering the UX with their bare hands with Windows 11 is helping bridge the gap a lot.

Personally I have gotten quite lucky. I don’t use any NVidia hardware - and this alone already wipes away 60-70% of the common issues that people complain about. There is a lot of weirdness that doesn’t even look like it depends on the GPU (like buggy standby behaviour) that depends on the GPU and that is not reproducible - NVidia setups are a toss up that could go anywhere from “just fine” to “a total disaster”. Not only that, but Linux support means that if any of the dozens of components on your computer doesn’t quite support Linux, there is so much seemingly unrelated stuff that breaks that you wouldn’t believe. I had a friend who was incredibly unlucky on Linux and had mysterious sudden system crashes and some very exotic errors that I had given up debugging. We finally got down to, literally, trying to unplug device after device for an extended window of time out of desperation - and we found out the culprit was a small USB audio card that he used for headphones. A small USB audio card that was misbehaving and had a poor quality Linux driver caused a lot of issues that never would I have traced back to an audio card. I have also used a laptop that had a lot of mysterious issues like erratic sleep/wake behaviour and system hangs / freezes that were caused by the Wi-Fi card. Would you ever think that your Wi-Fi card is causing your computer to randomly crash seemingly out of nowhere? Exactly. This is why I think the “luck” factor is huge for your success on Linux. Sadly, hardware manufacturers mostly target Windows. Linux works well with simple setups with hand-picked components from a handful of brands that are known to work as intended. But the more complicated your gaming setup is, the worse it gets. Hell, multi monitor setups with different resolutions and refresh rates can already be a challenge, whereas Windows has a good handling of them now. If you mix GPUs and have a GeForce and a Radeon in your system, just forget about it. You will get a lot of erratic behaviour unless you exclusively run AMD.

The Steam Deck is an example of how well a properly supported Linux system could work. It’s custom hardware with parts picked with Linux support as the utmost priority. The Steam Deck experience is, in fact, much smoother than the average Linux desktop experience, with a hell of a lot less rough edges that show up.

I still encourage you to run Linux, but also understand that it’s still growing, and this means that hardware and commercial software vendors are yet to support it properly still. It’s going to be a d20 throw between “perfect”, “horribly broken” and “mostly working well but with some rough patches you can work around”.