I'd recommend using the arch wiki for troubleshooting your problems. They have some of the most complete documentation of all things linux I've ever found. The fixes will mostly be applicable to other distros. 1) For the yellow tint the only thing I can think of using is xrandr, and almost every graphical enviroment has a front-end for it. If not you can run xrandr in the terminal to list the screens, and use 'sudo xrandr --output <screen name> --gamma r:g:b' to set the gamma correction. As for the trackpoint you should probably read the manual page for xinput. Type "man xinput" to view it. (reading manual pages is a great way to troubleshoot problems) 2) Sed is a regular expression parser. I'm terrible at regular expressions but the script you've been told to run prints everything from the output of xinput that looks like "id=number". It's kind of unnecessary because the output of xinput is like 10 lines and is very human-readable. You made the right choice by not running some random lines of code before you know what they do. 3) I'd recommend dual-booting, unless you're okay with abandoning those games forever. Hope I could help.
Thanks. I'll keep the arch wiki as well as xrandr in mind. Now that you mention it, I eventually managed to play with my colors via xrandr, but ended up staying with windows for the time being (I was using live environments.) I'll also go with the dual boot for now. However, I don't want windows to have access to anything it doesn't strictly need access to for a few games. I was originally going to reset the system and shrink my ssd partition. Unfortunately, shrinking isn't an option according to Windows's partition manager. I'll therefore format that ssd and install windows on a 40gig partition. It'll get a few hundred gigs on one of my hdds for games. That leaves about 60 ssd gigs for linux. Currently, the plan is to assign / to the ssd (so the system is snappy), but mount /usr, /swap, /opt and /home on a hdd (for capacity / read-write reasons). Does this sound good?
Wouldn't using the ssd as swap mean that I end up with regular writes to the ssd? I don't want to shorten its lifespan more than necessary. I don't expect to run out of ram too often at 12gig, but assume that some programs might just use /swap anyways. Does /usr, /opt and /home on one partition sound okay? Or should /home have its own partition (for upgrade reasons)?
swap is allocated by the kernel. If you have 12GiB of memory you're not in any danger of running out unless you're doing rendering or something, but some people like to have some just in case. also I would probably put /usr and /opt in the ssd, they are small and contain some executables/libraries.