It’s fixed!! Thank you so much!

Side note: also going to subscribe to the Arch newsletter to avoid mishaps like this in the future.

I am indeed using X11. I tried using Wayland ~a few months ago (on one or both of my setups, wish I could remember) and it did not work very nicely for me so I just stuck with X11, which so far has worked perfectly for what I do.

(Sorry for image quality) this is what I’ve got:

Element. It’s a popular client for Matrix, which is a federated messaging platform (similar to lemmy and mastodon) with different instances.

I had a slightly screwed up Fedora install due to being a noob with an NVIDIA 1060 and little clue on their drivers. I hooked my laptop up to an old TV (720p if that tells you how old it is lol) and… my entire desktop got absolutely screwed up. Everything was stuck in 4:3 resolution for some reason and my icons got bloated (for lack of a better term). I tried to fix it but IIRC, it just got worse and I had to reinstall.

Found my hobby

I’ve been using Mint for a few months now after initially trying Fedora and Kubuntu. Mint has been by far my favorite experience and I’ve even gotten a few people converted to Linux via Mint. Definitely my recommendation for any Linux newbies.

I have an NVIDIA 1060 and it is such a pain in the ass to deal with. The number of random problems I’ve had with it has put me off from ever buying a computer with NVIDIA hardware ever again. Save yourself the constant walking on eggshells and get AMD.