nvidia-dkms has never not worked for me. Arch wiki has more info in the nvidia page.
If this laptop is your friend’s main laptop, I’d recommend going for something other than arch or at the very least preparing before going into it
Dualsense edge(the expensive elite controller for PS) has everything except hall effect sticks. The stick modules themselves are replaceable and iirc gulikit said they’ll make hall effect ones
Your issue seems to be outdated packages, so I wouldn’t recommend distro hopping(especially to something arch based) for just that reason. Look into workarounds for those packages in mint itself. In the worst case scenario there’s also the option of compiling from source.
I wouldn’t recommend distro hopping to arch without some high level understanding of the different moving parts of the OS. EndeavourOS has given me almost no issues but when things break(like grub a while back) you have to be OK with touching parts of the system that just work and are taken for granted on distros like mint. It’s why I don’t consider anything arch based friendly to a “noob user”.
If you’re a “noob user” who wants to learn more you can try endeavourOS, that’s kind of the spirit of it.
Nothing is free on the internet. Its high time we accept that and choose to consciously and directly support services we use. It’s just cleaner that way. It’s also the only way to keep the internet free(free as in freedom).
Think of it like donating to Wikipedia - once I was able to give back, I started giving back. Soon, I hope to start contributing to lemmy OSS.
This is not even taking into consideration the practical issues with awards like the amount of dev and effort needed to create and manage a payment and “donation distribution” system.
GNU is Not Unix is recursive