I used Linux Mint and GTX 2070 for over a half a year without any major problems. Installation was incredibly easy as there was a dialog box asking to install drivers and everything just worked. I have 4 monitor setup even.
Ultimately I switched to AMD (last week) because of the tiny problems that I experienced but mostly because I wanted to support AMD and could reason for an GPU upgrade.
This year I made a ‘promise’ to play the top 20 NES games as when I was a child/teen I never managed to beat any of those.
Steam Deck is such a boon that I can play my nostalgia games one hour before when I go to bed instead of doom scrolling reddit or whatever.
And I have actually beaten smb 1 and ninja gaiden (with save states) and megaman 2 without any saves and I feel so good!
One of the things you could do as a new Linux user is to try out some support questions with your favorite search engine. Try ‘catchyos my headset mic is not working’ or ‘nobara how do I change my background wallpaper every 15 minutes’ or ‘<distro name> <real problem you’ve had the past 2 years>’.
This approach will give you an realistic view how much support you will have when you’re dealing with an actual problem.
I’m running lotro via Lutris happily on Mint. Your case sounds like a permission problem somewhere as the launcher works.
This is farfetched I know but try a nuclear option and use another distro to install lotro via Lutris to a shared mount and then mount & run it from there in your distro.
Quick version:
Rabbit hole:
I had the exact same problem on one of my virtual boxes. The problem baffled me for two years and I just added more space to the box a few times to fight it as I couldn’t solve the issue. It wasn’t the inodes, deleted but open files or anything common like that.
The problem was my mounts. I had occasionally failing mounts combined with crontabs that accessed and wrote data to those mounts. Do you know what happens when you accidentally wrote let’s say 200gb data to /mnt/a and then later mount a drive over that mount point? It magically ‘disappears’ as you’d exclude that mount from the calculations.
Might be you don’t have anything mounted and none of the above is useful to you. But this solved my issue and it’s quite curious and silly. Just set up mount points to not be writeable and problem went away.