It’s a bit sad how everybody talk about the new NTsync. Most games, like, 90% of them, are not bound by sync. You would get exactly no performance benefit in them. What’s better about it is the correctness of the implementation, more programs will work under WINE as a result of switching to NTsync. It’s a good thing, but media clearly seems to miss the point and only focus on a few cases where it would give an impressive performance benefit.

Unless your laptop uses some obscure networking hardware, should work out of the box. Never used Mint, but it looks like it uses NetworkManager by default, which I haven’t had any major issues with.