The display on my laptop is 4k and i can tell you i tried downscaling it was not as big a difference as simply turning the brightness down as low as was comfortable.

maybe a silly question bit is mint using pulse audio?

i unfortunately using kinoite for my desktop and Debian for my servers. I am not totally in love with kinoite but I don’t dislike it enough to change back to regular fedora.

you can use grub-mkconfig to verify the grub config and rebuild it if necessary. i dont recall the exact syntax for your distro so I would look it up first.

You are absolutely right we can not make them give us access to drivers but just like with nvidia there are people willing to figure it out. I am not for government oversight but if the manufacturers refuse to offer any help then they may need to step in. The EU has made massive strides towards standardizing manufacturers. I also don’t think it would be necessary for the manufacturers to open source their software but its already wrote just release it as closed source so it could be used at the community level.

Here’s my take which i have not seen in this thread. When you buy your hardware it is yours you should be allowed to do with it as you please. If you want to wipe the device and install another ROM or os you should be able to. Much like the recent fight for “right to repair” not allowing you to do what you want with your property should not be allowed. As long as the manufacturer blocks your ability to do what you want with your hardware it isn’t really your hardware.

I run an older dell xps 13. Its a bit under powered but most of my real work is done on a remote server.