About NVIDIA: yeah, Nvidia on Linux is a big, big mess. Things are improving but it’s still a pain in the ass sometimes. Maybe some of your issues could be solved by changing to another Desktop Enviroment.

About Bluetooth: I don’t know how recent your hardware is, but maybe changing to a newer kernel (preferably a more up to date Distro, like Fedora) would solve it.

About Compatibility: I don’t know what controllers you are using. I personally had issues with Xbox Wireless Controller drivers, and after some searching I easily fixed it with xpadneo, maybe that could help.

Mint is usually a great distro for beginners, BUT it sometimes sacrifices shiny new updates for stability (which is a good feature of Mint), that’s why I recommend you to try Fedora. Good luck with your Linux adventure 😃

Canonical deserves most of the critics they get.

Ubuntu users on the other hand don’t deserve even the slight amount of critic they get for just… Using Ubuntu. like, at least they use Linux, we should be encouraging them to keep using it.