When I first moved to linux I used Mint for a week and then moved to something else. As always by EVERYONE it was suggested to me as a “starter” distro and I really wish people would stop doing that.
I, like you, had issues with it. Sound issues, Wifi issues, GPU issues, and doing personal research and digging the consensus was always “it’s an issue with Mint.” I was about to go back to Windows 11 cause I was like “none of this linux shit works”
THEN I decided to try a different distro, CachyOS, and suddenly the sound was fixed, the wifi didn’t randomly drop out, and my GPU worked flawlessly. I’ve distro hopped since then and those Mint/Ubuntu issues never came back.
Try something other than Mint. if you still have the issues go back to Windows.
it depends.
I’m old enough to remember when PC demos were a thing and essentially if a demo didn’t exist, the game likely wouldn’t sell well. Hell there used to be entire websites that ONLY had demos for download of upcoming releases. So now game companies don’t do demos anymore, I pirate the games as a demo. If it’s something I think I’ll play through and come back to in a month or two or even a year then I’ll buy it. If it’s an indie dev I’ll buy it because I want to support them.
If it’s something I’m no likely to finish or will finish and never pick it up again, high seas.
Music is different. I just soulseek everything. I’m not paying some crappy streaming service to then provide pennies to the artist. I can support artists I like via other means. Merch sales, going to concerts, etc that’s where they get their money.
TV and movies? fuck em. I’m not paying for that crap when 9 times out of 10 something that I like is just going to get cancelled after 2 seasons. They don’t need my money.
Books? nope, always pay for those.