Welcome to Linux. I run mint and had screen tearing issues as well. Turns out mint detected my monitor correctly, but it had the wrong refresh rate. Once I set that to the correct refresh rate, my screen tearing was fixed. So I suggest checking that.

I’d argue that he’d use OpenBSD and be running his own firewall, web server, email server, and ftp server.

Thanks for posting this. I never realized there was this level of personal customization capable with Lemmy.