Hello!

Not sure whats happening on your side, but two usual pieces of advice will be:

- Try to launch Steam from terminal and see if it writes anything interesting after you exit the game.

- Try updating everything. I mean not only check for updates the usual way, but also update your kernel and/or your OS itself. Your OS is relatively old (even if it's still supported), and if you are planing to change it anyway - maybe try more up-to-date version of it first? Upgrading to at least LM 20.3 should be easy enough...

P. S. Also, you wrote that "many" Steam games hung your system. But not all of them? Which don't? And did you try launching games outside of Steam?

This is a bit off topic, but any particular reason you're still on Mint 20 when Mint 21 has been out for almost two years? Not judging you of course, the distro is still officially supported. But not the best choice for gaming, perhaps. Although I suppose an older kernel and base system might be less of a problem with Nvidia's graphics stack.

Thanks for the replies,
I didn't upgrade to Mint 21 because:
1. I didn't find the changes worth it for me
2. I think it was the first time Mint offered an upgrade option (before that it was a clean install)
3. I wanted LTS release (this is why I'm waiting for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS)

Other than that, all packages are up to date.

launch Steam from terminal might work, IF I'm fast enough to save the output somewhere before the OS freezes.

The games that freeze the system (that I can confirm), are Wigmund, The last Oricru, Technomancer (when started with the 4core+ workaround, runs fine - but after exit the system freezes).
Might be more, but didn't try them all.
It's just strange for me that so undemanding games freeze the system upon exist.

Even assassins creed Valhalla doesn't crash the system, it doesn't work well for me and I need to force quit - but the system doesn't crash.

Quoting: MaximBThanks for the replies,
I didn't upgrade to Mint 21 because:
1. I didn't find the changes worth it for me
2. I think it was the first time Mint offered an upgrade option (before that it was a clean install)
3. I wanted LTS release (this is why I'm waiting for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS)

Fair enough. But I will point out that every modern Mint release is based on an Ubuntu LTS base. Mint 20 was based on 20.04 and Mint 21 is based on 22.04. Mint 22 will be based on 24.04.

Just some thoughts from the top of my head:

- These sort of things tend to be either driver bugs, or sadly hardware failures.
- When did these issues start? New hardware, new drivers, firmware or BIOS upgrades etc?
- It's odd that the crashes come at game exit when presumably the system goes into a lower power mode. Would be interesting to see if disabling CPU and GPU power management, forcing them into their higher states would make a difference?
- Searching through Google/DDG There are quite a few similar issues described by Windows users with possible causes, solutions and workarounds. Quite possibly worth a try. E.g. check RAM with Memtest86+, disabling any overclocking. In one case the Discord overlay caused a similar problem but I'm not sure if that's an issue that translates to Linux.
- If you want to try newer or older distributions without a reinstall try a liveUSB with a persistent partition. Just install enough dependencies to satisfy Steam and run the games from the internal drives.