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.
Linux Mint makes it very easy to install Nvidia drivers and Optimus. I have used it in the past on a laptop with a similar configuration. It’s also quite robust, probably more than Garuda.
Second this. Mint is a “just works”, has support for nvidia and dual graphics, and it also does secure boot as well, which all distros should be doing by now… Arch
Arch does secure boot if you RTFM… Blaster
Only commentary would be you will want to go for the Edge ISO with the 6.2 Kernel because certain functions of your hardware might not work otherwise. I have a 2022 Lenovo Legion 5i with an nvidia 3070 GPU and it took some doing to get working properly. Suspend did not work, backlight needed tweaking, and things like RGB will also need to be figured out.
I mercifully left myself a guide for how to reinstall my OS (I’m a chronic distro hopper).
https://midwest.social/post/1266950
PS: Nobara was awesome till I had an issue and the only forum was, in my experience, a somewhat unresponsive Discord. Garuda, CachyOS, and a dozen other distros all had their ups and downs but Linux Mint holds a special place in my old heart given I freaking used it in high school in 2007. The forums and community will be here for what I assume is longer than most distros. For all the hoopla made of Wayland on gnome and KDE being all corporate supported and fancy I have seen miniscule difference between that and good ol X11 Mint. Clem (Guy being Mint) has been a studious and unexcitable hand guiding choices over the years. Don’t expect the newest and fanciest things going on over at mint. Expect the most mind shatteringly boring experience as you use you OS for programming, gaming, and computing I’m general as opposed to editing obscure config files, scraping through forums for answers, or reinstalling because you broke it.
I am bias and old but you can pull Linux Mint from my cold dead hands.
Wow, your guide may have just made my decision for me. Thank you so much for all the info, it’s incredibly helpful for a novice like myself!
As another person who’s used Linux for a long time, I also use Mint on my gaming machine because it’s so boringly stable I never waste time fixing it.
It just works
Man you just nudged me to it, will definitely try it out with my Legion together with PopOS as I’m fed up lately with Windows 11 lately, saving this post for later. I do very much like and prefer KDE, didn’t Mint have a KDE integrated release at some point or am I going senile? EDIT: definitely not senile, they had it as an option until 19, bummer