I've been using Mint for about two years and it games okay and also feels outdated. I built a gaming computer for a friend recently and put Bazzite on it and it runs games great and just works great as a whole
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If you want to game stick up with Windows, for everything else use Linux.
Nvidia user?
Maybe your friend have Nvidia GPU? I only just switched over to Linux and I managed to get all of my games working without any hassle with the help of Wine Proton and Lutris, maybe try to run games in steam launcher? I have better with it
I have an Nvidia GPU and aside from the occasional lemon of a driver, I've had no issues (to be sure, I don't use Wayland). I play games through Proton just fine. MHW, Elden Ring, Hunt Showdown, BG3, etc. Unfortunately the games he picked are borked or not listed on protondb. Not sure about Minecraft though, I used to play that just fine.
Aren't Roblox and old Minecraft rather efficient? FIFA 17 sounds like it's from 2017. To me it sounds like mostly old games so without the specs of the laptop which don't sound good with 256gb of storage I can't really judge whether 10fps in newer Minecraft versions isn't perhaps to be expected. Minecraft has always run the best on my machine (compared to most steam games which are more finicky when it comes to drivers. Btw for me fixing drivers it's usually just switching between the ones on flatpak and arch whenever it doesn't work and worst case I do a downgrade until it's fixed.)
Would it be worth testing the vanilla Minecraft launcher to see if that's the problem, perhaps compare the launch options if it's not possible? (I completely get not liking what Microsoft is doing with the launcher and I'm looking for an alternative at this point as well.)
It's possible that the laptop has an old/niche graphics card with bad driver support, which will probably be worse to try to fix on windows, unless they already know how to use the manufacturers likely gui based weird custom installer already (I think that's how Nvidia does it and of course it has ads).
Personally my experience on windows has been a nightmare with it breaking itself more often than Linux (while being used a fraction of the time or probably slightly more if I count the time spent on my old laptop which had slightly fewer issues). Luckily I don't have to use it but I do have a windows install in dual boot which takes 3x longer to start, shows me ads, requires me to plug the mouse in after booting for it to work.