Sounds pretty frustrating for a new PC, you would think there would be W11 webcam drivers already in place by ASUS. With older webcams built-in or not that do

Sounds pretty frustrating for a new PC, you would think there would be W11 webcam drivers already in place by ASUS. With older webcams built-in or not that do need drivers, I've had good luck going back as far as Vista drivers and manually "installing" the INF, the drivers load but the W1x Camera app still fails. Using the Ispy cam software or VLC works good though. Just had good luck adding Mint 22 to a SSD already having W11 24H2, using a previously prepared 16GB partition following after the Windows volume. I had already used Diskpart in CMD when booted to Recovery (or Install) media, to assign a volume letter to the ESP partition, so I could robocopy the original (Windows-only at this point) EFI folder to a backup location. The 16GB was partitioned by Windows but not formatted by Windows, it was confirmed totally zeroed before starting the Mint install and directing the "advanced" option to format as EXTx and use that existing final partition alone as / (root). The Linux installer then correctly created the EFI\ubuntu folder to exist alongside the unchanged EFI\Microsoft folder. Automatically included a bootentry to the existing Windows install onto the Grub boot menu, of which the main boot configuration files and kernels actually are stored within the EXT filesystem and are only "referenced" from the EFI\ubuntu folder.[0] The only true Windows-breaking change is a nothingburger, the fully-expected replacement of the previous EFI\boot\bootx64.efi file (which was a Windows-specific version when first-written to the folder, targeting EFI\Microsoft and the boot files contained therein) with a Linux-specific EFI\boot\bootx64.efi file of the same name, replacing it in the same folder. The newly-written EFI\boot\bootx64.efi (and its associates) are Linux-specific and target the EFI\ubuntu folder, which now contains a boot menu giving you a choice between Linux and Windows each time you restart, with Linux being the new default OS. This is the next point where an essential backup of the evolving EFI folder needs to be made, this time containing the now Linux-specific EFI\boot (with its new bootx64.efi and associates) as well as the new EFI\ubuntu folder along with the still-unchanged EFI\Microsoft folder. If a Mint installation was so broken that it failed to detect and add a bootmenu choice for the existing Windows volume, it would seem like so much of a disaster since Linux can still replace the (normally hidden) bootx64.efi file with its own and it could boot to Mint just fine but with no straightforward way to boot Windows any more. This is what people are really afraid of. In that case you would need to boot to the same Recovery media you used to access and back up the EFI folders, and simply overwrite (the Linux-specific) EFI\boot\bootx64.efi using the functional Windows-specific bootx64.efi backup made originally before subjecting it to wizardly manipulation. After that UEFI should smoothly act just like the regular Windows machine it was before, with no sign of Linux even though a perfectly viable Mint install is still present on the EXT volume and the EFI\ubuntu folder remains in position ready to spring into action if needed. The EFI\Microsoft folder remains unchanged by design, and ideally the EFI\ubuntu folder boots not only Linux, but also put the existing Windows on the Linux bootmenu itself. Either way with fully functional EFI OS startup folders like these in position, if desired (or if necessary) the firmware itself can be made to enter either the EFI\Microsoft or the EFI\ubuntu folder directly with higher priority than EFI\boot\. With a bit of UEFI configuration. . [0] I really prefer it when the kernels and fully-formed main grub.cfg file is actually stored on the EFI partition like some distros have, which is more advanced when you think about it since it's FAT32 and you can then do file-handling and editing for Linux boot parameters, plus Linux kernel upgrades completely from Windows if you want to.