Well. This is interesting. Seem to have sorted out getting video drivers… which is not as simple as it should be. Oh it’s simple, but each group of provider is of cause against the other (open source, custom, official) and so you need to either fight one (allowing unofficial repos) or fight the other (use opensource, but loose our on 95% of features). The NVidia drivers from their site are working, but I had to get them from a non-official (but legit as far as I can tell) repository, as I was not keen on installing manually.
Most of the motherboard bells and whistles (sensors, soundblaster Xfi etc) are not available, as no Linux drivers 
But that is no worries. Making/building/using a new pc is like that. What is a problem, is there is zero mouse configure-ability and support in Mint/Ubuntu.
Oh, it has “acceleration” and “Sensitivity [which is actually threshold, but who needs to label things correctly…]”. No “speed” and no scroll wheel sensitivity, or true sensitivity settings. This appears to be by design and/or choice. Oh, they could use the excuse it’s in the feature “to add/wish list”, but to have been left off for so long, it would require an active decision to avoid adding it! No, I can’t “fix it”, it’s a kernal/OS limit currently. 
So other than the floaty mouse (I’ve got a slight fix with 100% sensitivity on a 2x multiplier to almost simulate 2x velocity, but still has a little acceleration/deceleration
), it’s a great OS…
… oh, what was that about an OS being mainly a GUI experience? 