It's very good - in some cases better than Windows. I have a MSI gaming laptop. The battery lifedin longer on linux compared to Windows.
With custom scripts you can control fan speed. However... I have a intel/nVidia card on KDE with wayland and it is hell. Nothing works as expected, so I can't tell about gaming in itself.
Okay first question is : is MATE absolutely necessary ?
If not, I would advise you to switch to a distro that uses GNOME or KDE. I'd go for Zorin OS which is really perfect for anyone beginning on Linux.
In any case, I have a solution that should work no matter the device. It requires you to have libinput and libinput-gestures installed (rather than fusuma which I found buggy and laggy)
Every model that I have had workes well with Linux. I only had a problem with a Dell that wouldn't boot OpenSuSE but would boot every other distro so...
Well... That was a shitty article.