Look long story short, what i expected to be a short install ended up being a 5 hour manhunt for an issue that resulted in needing a closed source instead of open source nvidia driver. Shes all switched to linux, and if her trial goes well and i don't end up tearing my hair out doing tech support. I may switch over as well, probably a different distro though.
One thing i will say though, even though the state of gaming has drastically improved since my first foray into linux, the "fine details" of gaming have not. Fuck me the first time i looked into the modding scene on linux and how much busywork that took, that just killed a little bit of my soul. Even trying to get her game open, we first had a xbox game controller bluetooth not connecting issue, my bandaid was to do a wired connection, and sitting here just now i hear a laugh and look back and see this in her game. What i can only imagine is some sort of video player error, but the game works. Its rough, but it works.
It'll be interesting to see how this goes, thats for sure
What do you mean "unrelated to NVIDIA drivers"? It's literally the first sentence of OP's post (emphasis mine):
They did say the word driver, yes.
That is in no way evidence that their current problem is a problem with their gpu driver.
Inside the word install is the implication that they installed and configured lot of things in addition to the driver. Considering that the game launches but fails to play some multimedia file it’s incredibly unlikely to be a low level problem like an incorrect driver. This is typically a missing proprietary codec or library inside of the wine environment.