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Since Mint is based on a stable distro, it'll be running older software that won't support your newer hardware well, and you're experiencing that firsthand.

Try Fedora, Bazzite, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, or anything else that's more bleeding edge – they're still very usable and reliable, it's just that stable distros like Mint and Debian are "stable and reliable" overkill.

Edit: and if you're wondering why this wasn't mentioned to you from the start, the answer is likely that these distros tend to be:

1. Less popular and get fewer mentions and votes, and
2. Are considered riskier in an enterprise context, so stable distros are deemed a safe recommendation since the odds of things going wrong on supported hardware is extremely low.

Overlap with desktop Linux means support for that is support for these mobile Linux distros, and desktop Linux gets support from a range of people and companies, not just Google.

Maybe? Depends on what costs dominate operations. I imagine Chinese electricity is cheap but building new data centres is likely much cheaper % wise than countries like the US.

That's becoming less true. The cost of inference has been rising with bigger models, and even more so with "reasoning models".

Regardless, at the scale of 100M users, big one-off costs start looking small.

From what I've heard at work and from others, MS uses version queries to stall tickets because they constantly release updates that they can point to and say "you need to update before we can help".

I think it might be confusion between inspecting plaintext metadata like SNI vs actually inspecting encrypted contents (e.g. HTTPS content, headers, etc.).