From the article, I wish them the best but this line of thinking is not the Linux way:

The first app I installed on Ubuntu (on both my machines) was Chrome browser. While Chromium, the open source version of the browser, is available in Ubuntu’s App Center (its app store), the official Google version is not.

If you’re wanting to give Linux a try, you gotta be willing to let go of the Windows way. Chrome is not better than chromium because Google. Don’t complain that a specific app is hard to get running if you aren’t willing to try the alternatives, especially if there’s literally a Linux version maintained by the same developer

Looks to me like Nobara might be what you want, it’s fedora based and is tailored toward gaming. I haven’t used it myself, so I can’t comment on how it’s different from fedora, but Fedora itself is pretty darn solid

What sort of “simple” things did you have trouble with in Mint?

You could try popOS, Fedora, or Ubuntu. But without knowing what you struggled with, Mint should still be the best choice of you’re new. Your troubles could just be the desktop environment you picked, or enabling third party/proprietary repositories. Or they could be a legit issue that is easily fixed using a different distro.

Drivers are on the computer, firmware is in the component. Firmware can be updated in both windows and Linux and will affect both systems. Drivers live solely on the OS, so fedora drivers will not be affecting windows. There’s an incredibly small chance that your firmware was updated and caused this, but I don’t recall a firmware update ever occurring automatically on Linux, I’ve always had to do it manually.

FYI the greater-than symbol (>) will give you that quote look you want

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