Thanks for bringing up the display managers and Wayland support, I don’t know enough to weigh in on those.
And understand that its not a choice just between those two DEs.
If OP sticks with Mint, that would be the case, but Bazzite only has two DEs right now (KDE and Gnome, with Budgie “coming soon”). OP doesn’t sound like they want to tinker much, they just want something that works with a modern GPU and will keep working. Bazzite certainly fits that use-case, at least in my experience.
If you want to use newer hardware, and would rather not tinker with the system to get it working (and then have to maintain that tinkering yourself if something breaks later), Bazzite is probably the better option. It’s based on Fedora Atomic which is almost identical to rolling-release like Arch. I switched from Windows to Bazzite more than a year ago and have personally had no major issues, never had to mess with drivers or kernel updates due to the image-based system, and pretty much everything I might need for some workaround or another is included in the image. The community is very active on both the Discord and the web forum, and the documentation on the website is good as well, so there’s no shortage of help and available resources if you run into an issue or don’t know how to do something.
The main thing you need to be aware of going in is to be sure of which Desktop Environment you want (KDE or Gnome), because their user-space configs (which are not part of the image) interfere with each other so you can’t really switch between them without breaking a lot of things. Coming from Windows, I picked KDE and have been very happy with it.
They said they’re getting a 9070xt - that is an AMD GPU.
Another factor is this: Where do the physical goods come from that USAID sends? Answer: US businesses. The food? US farmers. Weapons? US contractors. Medical supplies? US suppliers. All the money “given” to foreign countries by USAID is actually given to Americans, buying their goods in order to give them to foreign countries. It’s a huge economic boon that flew under the radar all this time. By destroying this program, Musk and Trump are gleefully destroying the livelihoods of thousands of Americans, if not millions after their efforts collapse the food supply and possibly the US dollar if they try hard enough.
That’s not even getting into things like USAID providing medical supplies to developing nations dealing with communicable yet curable diseases like Tuberculosis. Destroying these diseases in the developing world helps protect Americans. To walk back that work is absurdly shortsighted.
The best description I’ve ever heard of LLMs is “a blurry jpeg of the internet”. From the perspective of data compression and retrieval, they’re impressive… but they’re still a blurry jpeg. The image doesn’t change, you can only zoom in on different parts of it and apply extra filters, and there’s nothing you can truly do about the compression artifacts (what we call “hallucinations”). It can’t think, it can’t learn, it just is, and that’s all it will ever be.