The display on my laptop is 4k and i can tell you i tried downscaling it was not as big a difference as simply turning the brightness down as low as was comfortable.

maybe a silly question bit is mint using pulse audio?

i unfortunately using kinoite for my desktop and Debian for my servers. I am not totally in love with kinoite but I don't dislike it enough to change back to regular fedora.

you can use grub-mkconfig to verify the grub config and rebuild it if necessary. i dont recall the exact syntax for your distro so I would look it up first.

I am not positive but if it still true originally webos was not linux. It started off as a very ahead of its time cell phone os made by Palm Inc. After they failed to gain traction it was sold to LG or made open source then sold or bought. LG uses it in their TVs but if I recall the base os is not Linux but some form of palmos assuming it has not been moved to Linux.

You are absolutely right we can not make them give us access to drivers but just like with nvidia there are people willing to figure it out. I am not for government oversight but if the manufacturers refuse to offer any help then they may need to step in. The EU has made massive strides towards standardizing manufacturers. I also don't think it would be necessary for the manufacturers to open source their software but its already wrote just release it as closed source so it could be used at the community level.

Here's my take which i have not seen in this thread. When you buy your hardware it is yours you should be allowed to do with it as you please. If you want to wipe the device and install another ROM or os you should be able to. Much like the recent fight for "right to repair" not allowing you to do what you want with your property should not be allowed. As long as the manufacturer blocks your ability to do what you want with your hardware it isn't really your hardware.

Display port does not have audio

Sounds like me. I ordered it from a magazine and installed it from 3.5 floppy disks also. After that it was Debian and i used that for years.

I am aware of openwrt and used to use when I used router hardware. I have moved to pfsense. I install it on either a 1 liter mini PC or some other older enterprise piece of hardware.

I run an older dell xps 13. Its a bit under powered but most of my real work is done on a remote server.