It isn’t really clear from what you have said if you are using a laptop or desktop. If you are using a laptop chances are you only have one primary storage medium, likely an HDD or SSD. If it is a desktop it is more likely you have or can have two drives. If you have the option of having two entirely separate drives you can keep Windows installed on one drive and Linux on the other. You could select your boot device on startup and the chance of one messing with the other is reduced a lot.

A potentially better way to learn is to either install linux on an old or spare machine or to just boot off a live USB. The great thing with a live USB is you can access the system, use the software management stuff, try out finding settings and getting things done, all while being able to just reboot and have everything go back to normal after. If you want you can even make the USB a persistent install, so changes hang around and allow you to keep using the system in Linux with your changes over multiple reboots.

That all said, my honest recommendation is to use VirtualBox or a similar program. VirtualBox lets you run a virtual machine and install Linux on it without risking anything on your main system. You can learn how to do software updates, install new programs, configure things, and so on all while touching nothing on your system. Your machine can keep working as normal in Windows, you can learn with no risk, and you can compare different versions of Linux to see what you prefer. The process for setting up a virtual machine in VirtualBox is fairly simple and should only take about half an hour to do, so it isn’t a big time investment.

Is this running with Vulkan? Have you tried using other graphics backends like DX or similar?

Have you tried windowed mode? That had fixed a similar issue for me before.

Have you tried running the graphics settings all down to as low as possible, like absolute potato mode, to see if it continues there? If it works as a potato then adding a few things until you replicate the issue will help you narrow it down. If it happens on potato mode then maybe try verifying the game files?

Lastly, maybe consider trying an earlier driver version? Same for kernel? Sometimes weird issues like this are regressions and it was actually solved a few versions back but someone recreated the problem because they thought they were being smart and regressed the issue.

It is more than that. In previous studies from the authors they have controlled for the nutritional content and the processing and found that the content itself, so carbs fats etc, have a certain amount of causal influence on health, but the processing also has a separate and significant effect. Just having less processing seems to have a meaningful effect. This means less of the additives like milk powder, xanthan gum, sweeteners, flavourings, extracts, and so on. The exact mechanism seems to vary depending on the specific case, but separating components of food and then remixing them as well as adding non food components and processing with heat and pressure seems to make these things no longer digestible and safe.

Nice, good to hear it worked out mostly. As for the black menu issue, consider looking at using various different libraries. For example, some games need the actual Windows .DLL files depending in exactly how they use them. The substitutes in WINE are just that, substitutes, so they have very slightly different behaviour in some cases. For GUI libraries if you get something wrong it is easy to have problems like a black menu box from something loading out of order, returning too fast or slow, or just being formatted differently. The native libraries can be used and that can sometimes solve the issue.

Yes, this can be done through WINE.

Depending on your method of install for WINE you will use different specific buttons and so on, but the idea is the same. Take the patch .exe file and run it inside the same WINE prefix as the game is installed in. This can usually be done by opening Lutris and selecting the game, then clicking not in Run but on the WINE icon near it. That allows you to select the .exe file and run it in the same WINE prefix as your existing game install. From there the patch should be able to find the game at C:\Path\to\game and make the required changes.

Hope that works out for you

How did you go? Any luck?

NTFS does not have the permissions structures Linux native filesystems have. All sorts of problems come from using NTFS for executable files. That said, exfat seems better in a bunch of ways, maybe try that?

What is a CHA score? I can’t find something that fits the initialism with any relevance, certainly not a CHADS score (stroke risk).

What do you do with a faulty RAID drive? Early in the morning!

Oh, great, that actually limits what it is a lot. If it were related to video we could spend ages looking at codecs, drivers, all sorts of stuff.

If it happens in all windows including winecfg we have to be looking at a few causes.

Do you have a high polling rate mouse? That can cause a stutter issue. To test remove the mouse before launching something in wine (by terminal if you have to), then see if it replicates the issue. If no change, move on, next item.

You could be having a problem with your audio system trying to give things too quickly and falling over itself. Prefix the wine command with the below line.

PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60

So it would be something like

PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 winecfg

That should stop it if it is that audio issue, so see how you go.

Lastly, if you have winecfg running it is slowing itself down, but is it impacting other programs as well? I assume so, but want to make sure, so if you are for example playing a video in your browser and then launch winecfg does it start stuttering the video?

If none of the above helps can you dump the output of ps , mount, lspci -k, and iostat while no wine is running and while wine is running? Iostat is in iotools in mint I think, you may need to install it. Also, probably use a pastebin for the outputs.

You may be having a disk seek issue. Are you on a spinning disk? If so, sometimes running something a couple of times will have some cached or at least have the heads in the right spot to read the needed data. If that is the issue upgrading to an SSD would probably solve the issue at the root. A possible test would be using a RAM disk if you can be bothered testing it, you have sufficient RAM that it may be viable depending on the game.

That all said, for next steps I would personally consider if maybe an older version of WINE would work. Could you try installing another older version of both the vanilla and GE versions? Also, did you update your nVidia drivers recently? Maybe roll back if your system will work with that, I can do it easily in EndeavourOS but Mint is not something I am recently acquainted with, it may be a real pain or may tank your driver install to try and roll back. Also testing installing a browser in WINE and loading a video that way may help troubleshoot, or VLC through WINE and native to compare. Ultimately you want to try and find the difference between the failed states and the working states, so if you come back bring a log from a working run and a failed run.