Vibes are great. You can still hear people talk, appreciate music, and have awareness of things around you, but it is all down by a sizable number of decibels. They are also comfortable and don’t make the blocked ear feeling.

https://www.discovervibes.com/

I also like using TWS headphones with foam tips. I have SoundLiberty 79s and they are great, put some good foam tips on them and they act at earplugs as well. Maybe not as useful for your situation but maybe good for other times. The SoundLiberty 79s are not sold any more, not sure about a good replacement.

Half Life 2, I got a new laptop a couple of years ago and it was the first that could actually play it properly but I never got to it, then the big update came out and wow, so worth it, loving it.

TES IV Oblivion. Love it, so silly, I love thieving.

Autonauts vs Piratebots, such a fun and cute little programming game.

So broadly you will find categories in games like Smash Bros and so on. Some characters will be heavy, some light, some fast, some slow, some strong, some weak, but each trait creates an axis. The ideal distribution of characters is to have all areas of the multidimensional space filled or if not filled at least alternated.

For example, you should have one heavy, fast, weak character, one heavy, slow, strong, but maybe not a heavy, fast strong or a heavy slow weak. You can chart them on a two dimension axis at a time, then use the characters from Tuxcart etc to fill the space based on what makes sense, eg the Gnu should be heavy but also fast, but it is definitely a prey animal, while penguins are smaller and fast with a more moderate attack level, maybe even weak.

Once you have some of the extremes filled you can consider subversions of the paradigm. For example, a compiled language is slow at creation but fast at use, so maybe a mascot for one of those could have two modes, switching state and therefore characteristics.

Another thing to consider would be the dynamics of your interactions. Are you going for the jumping around of Smash Bros? If so, lots of the details about their camera work can guide your decisions. What about the overall pacing? Do you want frenetic play like Smash Bros? Combos? Strategy? Lots of things to look at there with a narrative approach to the characters as representing their projects, for example Wilbur is smaller and supposed to be super modular, so maybe having quite a few modes with different characteristics would work, while something like puffy is great for water levels alongside tux and any other aquatics.

I was holding back so hard on recommending EndeavourOS. I love it, it is my main distro and honestly everything else seems unrefined by comparison. The Timeshift setup with BTRFS is insanely useful and largely preconfigured. The lack of a GUI for package management is not a big deal if you can learn to use pacman and yay, and honestly cheat sheets are a win there. Hopefully EndeavourOS will work out for you, and if not then we can go with next steps for the WINE issue.

Oh, great, that actually limits what it is a lot. If it were related to video we could spend ages looking at codecs, drivers, all sorts of stuff.

If it happens in all windows including winecfg we have to be looking at a few causes.

Do you have a high polling rate mouse? That can cause a stutter issue. To test remove the mouse before launching something in wine (by terminal if you have to), then see if it replicates the issue. If no change, move on, next item.

You could be having a problem with your audio system trying to give things too quickly and falling over itself. Prefix the wine command with the below line.

PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60

So it would be something like

PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 winecfg

That should stop it if it is that audio issue, so see how you go.

Lastly, if you have winecfg running it is slowing itself down, but is it impacting other programs as well? I assume so, but want to make sure, so if you are for example playing a video in your browser and then launch winecfg does it start stuttering the video?

If none of the above helps can you dump the output of ps , mount, lspci -k, and iostat while no wine is running and while wine is running? Iostat is in iotools in mint I think, you may need to install it. Also, probably use a pastebin for the outputs.

You may be having a disk seek issue. Are you on a spinning disk? If so, sometimes running something a couple of times will have some cached or at least have the heads in the right spot to read the needed data. If that is the issue upgrading to an SSD would probably solve the issue at the root. A possible test would be using a RAM disk if you can be bothered testing it, you have sufficient RAM that it may be viable depending on the game.

That all said, for next steps I would personally consider if maybe an older version of WINE would work. Could you try installing another older version of both the vanilla and GE versions? Also, did you update your nVidia drivers recently? Maybe roll back if your system will work with that, I can do it easily in EndeavourOS but Mint is not something I am recently acquainted with, it may be a real pain or may tank your driver install to try and roll back. Also testing installing a browser in WINE and loading a video that way may help troubleshoot, or VLC through WINE and native to compare. Ultimately you want to try and find the difference between the failed states and the working states, so if you come back bring a log from a working run and a failed run.