I’m on the market to buy a new laptop, and Lemmy has successfully coaxed and goaded me to give Linux a serious try.
I’ve never used *nix as my personal OS.
Which hardware/laptop do you recommend? And which OS to pair it with for a Linux newbie?
I’m a software engineer, and quit my job to pursue an MSc in AI. So my uses will be:
- programming
- study
- browsing lemmy
- gaming
The proprietary Nvidia graphics drivers works pretty well in most distros. Just go to your distro’s driver manager and enable the proprietary driver.
Nvidia cards can still be tricky, especially on optimus laptops. It’s not nearly as problematic as it used to be, but I still run into occasional issues with it. If I ever buy a new computer for gaming, I’m going to go with AMD.
I did, and I’d do it again next time. You can eventually convince NVIDIA cards to go, but relatively, AMD just works.
Linux gaming on laptops in GENERAL can still be tricky
Source: have both optimus and advantage laptops.
AMD mobile graphics tend to sometimes have less hiccups, but for the most part you are still going to have to tell the program to use the dGPU.
I don’t mind telling the game to use a dedicated graphics card and I don’t mind tinkering in general, but I want the graphics driver to work as expected. For example my Nvidia optimus setup doesn’t always play nice with the external monitor and I’m currently dealing an issue where an nvidia specific setting is needed to get some games working, but that same setting causes issues in other games.