Mint is less than 2 years old, that's NOT old enough to say "I won't support it". If Microsoft was doing the same with Windows, they would never succeed. Compatibility is a big, big thing, and as I said, it's users who use Mint that require his Appimage, not an Arch seasoned user. He misses the point. Just let him bundle more dependencies. It's already 1.25 GB the package, what if it was 1.3 GB? Not a big difference.
His continuing hatred for Linux Mint (disguised as "old distro, old libraries") to not support it, kind of bothers me. Mint users are the ones who would need this shortcut more than a seasoned user.
Also, this appimage is not well done, it's hardcoded to libfuse2.so, and so even Debian-Testing doesn't work (that only has libfuse3).
Ignore the guy who said that you don't have to use Gnome. Gnome is the most Mac-Like, and so is Elementary OS (that is directly copying MacOS). So I'd suggest either Debian 13 with Gnome, or Elementary OS. Elementary OS, by being based on Ubuntu, it has more stuff ready to go (Debian might still need manual adding of repositories, e.g. non-free, if you want to have an accelerated video encoding driver with your video editor).
VMs won't do for long, because you won't have proper acceleration as it's required by gfx apps like Lightroom. Sure, they'll work, but you'll experience slowdowns. You can run accelerated VMs, but I find them buggy.
If you're going to dual boot, you should install Linux on a separate DRIVE, not just a partition, and install the bootloader on that second drive. You force Linux to do that by disabling in the BIOS the Windows drive first, before installation. Then, you re-enable it again. Then you can choose what to boot at using F12 during boot time. If you put them on the same drive, Windows will eventually overwrite the bootloader.
Ubuntu, which is all-in on Wayland, does not wake up from sleep with our nvidia 3060. We have to reset the machine. So, no, it's not an edge case, we have a very, very popular Asus motherboard (the one everyone recommended on youtube 3 years ago), and still nothing. Even with newer versions of the driver, newer versions of ubuntu, same problem occurs.
I'd check the HDMI cable actually. I've had PCs fail with some hdmi cables, so try another one, from another brand (or whatever cable standard you're using).
I think you mistyped your model, it's 151, not 510. These are the drivers for linux that work in conjuction to CUPS: https://www.usa.canon.com/support/p/imageclass-lbp151dw
After installation, if it doesn't work, it's because these drivers haven't been updated since forever... The blame is on Canon.
You don't really need a fast laptop for this, anything that goes over 10000 points on the Passmark CPU test, is enough (and with an integrated Intel cpu, if you want the best support for video codecs).
In Europe, the cheapest way is to get a DELL that comes with Linux. They're 99.9% compatible, with firmware updates supported via fwupd on linux, the only thing is hit or miss is palm rejection on the touchpad. Everything else works. In Greece these start at 600 euros with 16 GB of RAM, 750 euros for 32 GB of RAM. I bought one myself recently, with an intel cpu at 15k points on passmark. Plenty fast. Only thing that doesn't work accelerated is Blender (it works in cpu mode only), as it requires non-integrated GPUs. Resolve works now with intel gpus on linux too, and so is kdenlive.
That's why I don't use flatpaks, either they're not accelerated, or they can't use external libs already installed, or they can't print etc etc. Sure, that's all fixable if the devs were doing a good job on flatpaking, but they don't, as it's quite complex. So we end up with apps that have a reduced featured set. I personally prefer appimages, even if they're a pain to update manually (from official sources always). I have about 10-15 such apps that I update them once a month manually. Everything else is from the official repo.
You might want to look at this one to sync your home folder: https://freefilesync.org/vision.php
and then use ssh for system updates. There are no OSes that do this kind of synchronization except maybe NixOS.
Try a newer distro, in case the bluetooth stack on Mint from 2024 is too old. Maybe the latest ubuntu, and see if that works (try the live cd, no need to install). If not, try Fedora, which is different enough to possibly implement things a bit differently. If that doesn't work either, you're probably out of luck. The asha protocol has bugs on linux. Basically, Linux is great for common hardware, not so good for uncommon one.
Gajim. It's still developed.