I do realize that yes, that's why I offered a couple of solutions to things that had nothing to do with that. Like thinking you had made a mistake or being afraid of messing up another OS on your machine.

I'm not trying to talk down to you, I'm trying to understand what your issue is, that's why I'm asking questions.

So why was it that you needed to cancel the installation?

Ive never tried installing Mint, but it's based on Ubuntu which have installed many times. Unless the installer is radically different it asks you a bunch of questions first, keyboard layout, timezone, whether or not it will be a dual boot or clean install etc. It typically doesn't actually make any changes to the system until all that is set up and you select install.

The only exception to that I can think of is if you got to the point where you can configure your partitions in a dual boot scenario. If you made a mistake during that process, I can see it messing up your install if you then back out.

Other than that the only way I can think of that might bork you system is if you actually started installing the OS, and then attempted to cancel, at which point it makes perfect sense to me that would mess things up.

The only thing I really take issue with is acting as if cancelling an install of an OS halfway through the process is like such a common thing that enough people would run into the same issue that it would turn people off from installing Linux.

Truth is windows has plenty of bugs too, the main difference is that it comes pre installed so you don't have to deal with the install bugs, and you're already acclimated to all its quirks so you don't notice them as much.

As for Mint, it gets recommended a lot because it's stable and looks a lot like windows, but it's old and slow to update to modern standards, you can always go for a more bleeding edge distribution like fedora.

Honestly, just try something else. If you're trying to do gaming, I'd recommend Garuda Dragonized from personal experience. It's Arch based, but comes packaged with everything you'd need for gaming, and a utility to install a bunch of extra stuff you might want, like launchers, controller drivers, etc. I think it even comes with the Nvidia drivers that you'll need to install manually for most other distros.

I my opinion it's really ugly out of the box sadly, with a horrible "gamer" look. It's KDE though, so it's really easy to customize.

Desktop mode is a nice extra because Valve are generally nice. But it's not what the purpose of SteamOS is. It's just an aside. The same way you can get a shell on your wifi camera. And you could run some silly servers on it. But that's not the point of your camera.