I’ve had very good experiences with both but wanted to give debian a try, after accepting that it’s nvidia drivers and Optimus support suck, I need to decide whether to use EndeavourOS or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, not using base arch because I don’t want to go through the install hassle.
Installed Tumbleweed on my laptop last weekend after giving up on Arch. I realized I just don’t have the time Arch demands. OpenSUSE has been pretty nice so far, everything seems to just work, I can’t complain!
How do you setup Nvidia optimus with TW?
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_drivers https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_SUSE_Prime Do not use bumblebee. Install your nvidia drivers and then if it didn’t automatically install suse-prime. The command to configure it is prime-select
Do you have a newer GPU? Because I have a Pascal GPU and this alone doesn’t seem to fully power off the GPU in intel mode…
Ended up going with OpenSUSE after installing EndeavourOS and kde crashing after opening up the notification applet
I tested both and ended up with EndeavourOS because SuSE have some restrictions and issues with codecs and the Packman repository that can get a bit iffy… e.g. recently different versions of mesa on suse vs. packman messed up some applications, though it got fixed.
Also for some reason SuSE didn’t support my vol up/down keys, etc. I didn’t investigate.
So I grabbed EndeavourOS, choose [NVidia] proprietary drivers mode when booting the installer (the install will then automatically also install NV proprietary drivers). I picked the BTRFS filesystem with Grub (for snapshot support) at install and simply later ran “yay -S snapper-support btrfs-assistant” to get automatic snapshot support.
I do have Optimus disabled though, I run the Nvidia in Dedicated mode so I can’t say how well Optimus works.
Just wanted to pitch in my experience and say my volume up/down keys on my keyboard worked out of the box, so it’s not a universal issue, and still worth giving OpenSUSE a try.
I do use NVidia with OpenSUSE, but I don’t use Optimus, so I can’t be of much help.
I just installed Debian 12 on an Optimus laptop and had no issues. Well none that I can blame on Debian. Somehow secure boot got re-enabled which blocks the Nvidia drivers from loading. But once I figured that out drivers installed great, and not having any problems. Worth a try since you say you want to try Debian.
