Weird that wifi doesn't work, maybe it's 5ghz on iphone and your laptop doesn't support?
Anyway you could try bluetooth tethering, it could be a bit slower than usb but it's more convenient, just keeping both in the same room should get good signal. I had no problems on android + linux using blueman.
I think mint uses blueberry, dunno if it supports tethering too, but it's pretty easy to switch from one to the other.
Star Ruler 2, the company closed down and open sourced the game, it's a space 4X real time, has pretty good fleet combat and u can design ships, i think wasn't popular because the resource management and card system is a bit weird and harder to understand than other strategy games, but pretty fun after u get used to it...
4-5 years i think since i switched to linux, no problems specific to gpu AFAIK (on X11), even tried some crypto mining and CUDA stuff, what didn't work was wayland when i tested 1-2 yrs ago just to see what the hype was about, it was unusable but i'm not in a hurry to switch since i use LXQt...
GPU is a GTX1060 3gb.
1060 3gb here, worked fine on all distros i tried when i switched and hopped a little. Used mint, mx, debian, manjaro, artix, void and arch.