Since Win 10 support is being cancelled next year and I've had enough of M$ corporate B$ of Win 11 not supporting my brand new decade and a half old cpu aside from becoming a security liability it's finally time to take the plunge.
In the past I've dabbled with Ubuntu with less than satisfactory results but I've been told Linux Mint is as good for gaming as Windows now (probably not but we'll have to see).

Because I'm on older hardware I generally don't play the latest and greatest but that doesn't bother me.
What does bother me is if anyone can tell me how good controller support is, I use a Logitech Cordless Rumblepad, which to me is the greatest gaming implement ever devised. However it being an older gamepad I have to use an Xinput emulator (x360ce) to play games that have Xinput support only.
So my question is: Will Mint support my gamepad in both DirectInput and Xinput mode?

My other question is regarding undervolting my gpu and framerate control,
Because I don't like my gpu making noise and consuming power that would make my vacuumcleaner jealous I undervolt my gpu and run my monitors refresh rate (60-75Hz).
I Undervolt by running a profile in AMD gpu driver as it allows for more options and better general control.
For framerate control I'm using MSI Afterburner + RTSS, which has very robust framerate control.
Will Mint have similar software that allows this?

If your pad is the Logitech 710 I believe the drivers are baked into the kernel. I use the 710 in Zorin OS and it is recognized with no additional drivers needed.

For cpu/gpu control there are a few open source projects that may do what you need such as corectrl. Will need to do a search but there should be a few apps in Mints software manager.

OP may be referring to the actual "Logitech Cordless Rumble Pad".

No the Cordless Rumblepad is an older version.
I actually have the F710, two of them actually, which I dislike, aside from getting connection problems when more than 2 meters away and having terrible analog triggers it also has round axis limits, which is sometimes better, sometimes worse for playing games. The F710 has the advantage of having a Xinput - DirectInput switch though so there's that.

Oh yes I forgot to ask, is there good button/axis configuration software on Linux? My bad I meant the Rumblepad 2.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cordless+rumble+pad+2&t=newext&atb=v404-1&iax=images&ia=images

If Batocera and Lakka are anything to go by, then controller support is getting better and better all the time. On those it's plug-and-play, for graphics cards and controllers.

If you need pretty sure you can run lspci which should output a bunch of technical data, but you'd want to get the hardware ID, which is 0000:0000 format. Left side is manufacturer and right side is the actual product ID. Copy paste that and search for it, and search engines will give you the name of the device you may have to identify with to make it work, or even drivers to download. This trick also works in windows (if you do the hardware info lookup) to identify unknown hardware when you can't tell what your video/sound card is.

I recommend Mangohud for framerate limit control. Added benefit of it being the best tool for gaming metrics monitoring, and benchmarking.

Batocera is good, but not flawless.
The only controller that I got to work with it flawlessly, is my Switch Pro Controller.
All the others may work at first, but at the second or third start up, the "hotkey" fails to work.
No clue why.

Mhmm.. I'm using Vilros controllers, and have yet to have the hotkey fail. And they seem preconfigured out of the box too making that easy.

Lakka the left analog stick often outputs to the Dpad too, making games that rely on both sets of buttons impossible to play (you wanted to move forward, but instead you pull up the tactical menu in FF12,. of Metroid Prime you keep switching weapons/modes). While Batocera seems to have that part working just fine.

The only issue I've had with Batocera and controllers is the 8bitdo zero (first version) bluetooth mini controller wich sometimes have trouble connecting for the first time but that's a problem with the controller since happens the same on Android. Otherwise, never had a problem even with more recent protocols.

Undervolt is possible but cumbersome to do, there's no control panel for simple tweaks like in Windows. If you need a tuturial, check some wich are made for mining cryptos.

The gamepad should be correctly recognised without issue but you need some software to translate to Xinput, there are some but I need to refresh my memory. Can't recall if antimicro translate to Xinput or can only assingn keyboard keys.

To be honest, if you want some "gaming" tweaks, like refresh rate control etc, Nobara Linux (made by glorious eggroll, anyone who play videogames on Linux knows this name) is the answer since the Linux Mint desktops (from what I know the best one is KDE and there's no Mint with KDE) are not very fancy. Gets the work done and is simple but lacks more advanced features, I'm using Cinnamon. You can change the refresh rate on Mint but once you start to add multi monitor things can get a bit hectic.

Mangohud is similar to RTSS and is a freaking godsend! It's what's used on the Steam Deck OS but may be a bit cumbersome to edit manually since there's no GUI. You can use Goverlay wich is a GUI for editing Mangohud and works very well, although there's some issue with Debian based distros (like Ubuntu and Mint), Haven't checked recently but at least 6 months ago the issue was still there.

You can try a USB live system (very easy to do, only requires a pen drive wich is used to install anyway) and try the Mint for a while without touching your Windows system, once you shut down every tweak is lost. Keep in mind that any change you make increases the RAM memory usage since it cannot save to disk.

Linux is Linux is Linux. The main difference is the family of package distributor (RPM, DEB, et al), and the packages the distribution will be maintaining.

Never confuse a desktop enviroment for the distro itself. Linux is not a single desktop. You are not stuck with Gnome, should you make that mistake.

Trust me, I've got over 15 of the fellas installed, including Cosmic Alpha, E16, Cinnamon, XFCE, IceWM, FVWM, and a considerable number more.

As for needing a button config?
Xinput and Dinput are implicitly supported. Shrug. I used an 8BitDo controller, that solves most of the problems since it's 4 controllers in one.

Depending if Mint has a recent version of Gamescope, you can indeed do frame limiting controls on games made by managers who were too incompetent to properly cap framerates. Now, I do have to note that my usage of Gamescope is utilized via Lutris.


My opinion: Mint is made of the scraps of Ubuntu that was grabbed off the dinnerplate of leftovers that Debian is constructed of. If you want current packages in a timely manner, be it on your own head.

To my understanding, custom kernel patches are done between major distros which make the kernel incompatible between distros to a degree; Though how far that affects things i'm not sure.

Mint is not made of the scraps left over, Mint gets rid of the garbage in Ubuntu and makes it a good usable OS. Use an Nvidia graphics card, with the Nvidia control panel all the things you are asking for are there, and to install the newest driver for it in Mint, just go to the Driver Manager and install it, and it will install the Nvidia Control panel as well. I got away from AMD years ago with Linux because I didn't have many options as you're finding out. The Cinnamon desktop which is the standard in Mint is being copied and used by many distributions, even Ubuntu has it and you see that it comes from Mint, Debian has it also. But if you want a Debian version of Mint, go for the LMDE 6, and of course it has the Cinnamon desktop and starts at kernel 6.1. Now with Mint's regular version go with the Edge version because of a newer kernel, it install with kernel 6.5. Mint is good and solid and a lot of support on the forum. I've been using it since 2011 and as far as the KDE extras stuff, works just fine on Mint 21.3. Use Lutris for games, and use the Flatpak version, runs great.

My Logitech F310 gamepad works flawlessly but is has no rumble and a hardware switch for Direct-Input/X-Input. Generally speaking hardware support for exotic gaming devices might be a problem and most hardware manufacturer's driver tweaking and overclocking software is not available. However, support tends to improve with newer kernel versions, so devices that don't work properly now might do so in future releases (unlike on Windows, Linux updates usually improve the user experience).

You could create a bootable USB stick with Linux Mint, start it, install a small game on it and check if it works out of the box. If not you may do further research on the web. There is a lot of stuff out there for Ubuntu and what works on Ubuntu usually works on Mint as well.

Probably still go emulator route. Or get a test program to output key inputs from the device.

From what i remember the SNES, Zsnes, Snes9x and PCSX2 were pretty good, you don't even need any roms for this, 'configure controller' and you hit the buttons as it prompts and tells you what buttons that maps to. If it all works, then that suffices. Shouldn't take more than a few megs (as long as it doesn't have a ton of dependencies.)

Could do the same thing with Batocera/Lakka where you run it off a live thumb-stick, kernel/drivers may not be exactly the same but it would be darn close.