A similar question was raised some day’s ago from a other person, but with different background. In this case, I would like to buy a nice gaming laptop. Of course I would use it for office and coding to, but primary I’m searching recommendations for gaming. I would like to play Wine/Proton game’s and also native Linux games. As OS, I like to use Manjaro Gnome.
Should I better buy all of AMD (if yes, which CPI, GPU) or Intel/Nvidia? Or Intel CPU and AMD GPU? Which combination is the right one with best performance for a casual gamer? I prefer FPS games, if that’s important…
I picked up a 2022 G14 RX6700s about a week ago from Beat Buy for $750. I added a 32GB memory stick to bring it up to 40GB. I also replaced the SSD with a 2TB 980 Pro. Since it’s all AMD it works without any futzing. I’m running openSUSE Tumbleweed and so far it all just works. Sleep, dual GPU’s, everything. I did add the AMD P-State flag which helped battery life tremendously. Even sleep just worked out of the box which is the first time I’ve ever had that experience.
My normal workload runs MS SQL Server in a docker container, two distroboxes for specific software, Outlook and Teams PWA apps, VSCode, Azure Data Studio, Firefox, and a couple of terminals windows, and it sits at about 8.5GB of memory idle. With Bluetooth connected and streaming YouTube Music and doing development I’m able to get about 7-8 hours of battery life.
I only play D3, D4, World of Warships, and Guild Wars 2. It plays those games without any issue even at 4K. I do recognize those games aren’t Starfield, so keep that in mind. For me, it works great and it been the easiest experience with Linux I’ve had.
At least with Tumbleweed. I tried Pop_OS! first and it worked great, until launching games on Steam froze X11 and required me jumping to a TTY screen to kill everything. So far Tumbleweed with Distrobox is giving me the best of everything and I’m loving it.
That sounds like a very good deal. (For context to other readers: It’s the Asus notebook I recommended in my reply as well.)
An Intel WiFi card is apparently also a good investment.