I’m planning on putting linux on a gaming laptop (an Asus TUF f15 from 2021), and I’m having a hard time deciding which distro to go with. I’m particularly interested in Nobara and Garuda, but any recommendations or advice are welcome.
I’d consider myself a novice at *nix, so I’m looking for something that’ll just work with a minimum of troubleshooting. From what I’ve read the biggest barrier to “just working” is probably going to be the GPU(s); for battery life reasons I need to be able to use the Nvidia card for games and the integrated GPU for less intensive tasks. If anyone could tell me about their experience with TUFs or getting Nvidia Optimus to work on linux I’d appreciate it.
I had a 970 and now a 3070. Used both with Kubuntu and they worked well enough but not on Wayland.
Note to self: avoid Wayland
I was considering trying out Hyprland as a first foray into tiling WMs, since it seemed relatively GUI-friendly, but I guess I’ll just go with i3
Well Wayland support and performance may vary. For Wayland to work well on nvidia the most recent software is needed.
Wayland support would get better with a bit more time. Wine has pushed updates in the latest versions for better Wayland support.
For gaming, X11 would work maybe a bit better for performance, however it could also have evolved fast and performance of Xwayland be better rn.
I wouldn’t say you need to avoid Wayland, but rather test how it works. On distros shipping Wayland and X11, you can often switch between them at the login screen.
For nobara, well it would be interesting and an “easy” start to fedora. Tho I tried to install it, and I never got to boot into it, while I installed fedora without any issues. Not sure if I made a mistake or an incompatibility with my laptop.
The issue with fedora, is that software without gui aren’t available in the gnome store. And only installable though command line with dnf or flatpak. Also the fedora forum help online is a bit of a desert, or soo old that it doesn’t apply anymore. Tho it could have evolved since I tried it. However the fedora support page is pretty good, tho it is missing some things on first install for some things. However Nobara would have already got all those issues dealt with.
If you have no experience with Linux, I’ll suggest to first discover with a distro, then when you feel a bit more comfortable to try other compositors. Using non “common” compositors may create bugs which may not be very much discussed online. So it can be a bit discouraging for a new user.
Thanks for all the info! My only experience so far has been with Ubuntu, so I’m cautiously branching out. Experimenting with WMs is definitely something I’m going to do later; I don’t think I’m quite there yet :P
Ubuntu is a bit of a between good and meh distro nowadays : It is well maintained and up to date enough, with the gnome desktop. So good enough.
However they push their own “proprietary” (at least for the servers), packaging format : snap. Currently it’s OK, but also a security nightmare.
Anyone can put software on there, it is not checked for malware, and there is very little official support from devs, so often it’s community packages, which obviously aren’t to be always trusted.
There are a bit similar issues with flatpak. But at least it’s open source. Tho not sure on how the official flatpak repo is checked for malware, if it even is.
For native packages (apt-get for Ubuntu as example) (not in their snap or flatpak containers), it is often maintained by trusted people in the community or companies. So the software is checked and more trustworthy.
Linux mint and pop os are based on Ubuntu, and so also use apt. But they don’t force snap packages if you like to stay on something you experimented with.
Other distros like fedora (or nobara) can use other packaging formats. Dnf for them. It works about the same, however as they don’t use the same packaging, they are not directly compatible with .deb files (often proposed by companies which software wasn’t put in a repo).
However, the flatpak community is also often here to get all these things working smoother. So for example discord isn’t available natively on fedora, but it is available from in flatpak.
Wayland with KDE is fine these days on Nvidia. On more exotic setups it might still cause some problems though.
It works better with newer cards. I am currently using Wayland on my 3090 and it works about 75% of the way I want it to. Occasionally the taskbar and/or system clock will freeze, which is fixed by a relog. Also the translucency in themes does not render properly, but that’s a small price to pay for full refresh rates across varied monitors.
I have a laptop with a 1650 and because it’s kind of a weird half-niche card, Wayland does not work well with it forcing me to stick with X.
Panel freeze is a known KDE bug on non-Intel GPUs. It’s fixed in Plasma 6, avoid it on Plasma 5 by disabling window previews for the panel.