A good [noob-friendly] Linux distro for Nvidia support and gaming?
A good [noob-friendly] Linux distro for Nvidia support and gaming?
Heyo comrades, I just bought a laptop with an Nvidia RTX 3060 (don't call me a capitalist, Italy discounts VAT on tech stuff if you're disabled) and was looking for a noob-friendly distro with a good Nvidia support (fuck those proprietary pigs)
I looked at Mint since I use it on my desktop, but it has an out of date kernel (I heard that you need 5.8 or above to game with Nvidia, once again fuck them. Never had an issue with my trusty rx580) would just updating the kernel be an option or should I be looking for a different distro?
My only 2 requirements are that:
It's noob friendly (something Debian-based maybe, with a .deb and APT based package management)
And that doesn't use a gnome DE, maybe something more like cinnamon, KDE of XFCE would be nice.
Thanks.
(sorry for long post, had to insult Nvidia)
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Nobara KDE
https://nobaraproject.org/Made by RedHat dev Glorious Eggroll who has been improving Proton and other tools for Linux gaming. Has a SteamDeck version. Welcome screen installs anything gaming you could want/need.
Tried Debian/Ubuntu distros but needed newer packages/drivers and it was time-consuming.
Tried Arch and derivatives but being that cutting edge had quirks.Fedora-based Nobara KDE hit that just-right spot of stability vs latest.
Games run better than they ever did on w11.
I was about to pull the trigger on nobara for my desktop, I will certainly try it on live USB after reimbursing my windows license (God bless the best 9/11, 9/11 2014,the day from which we can ask for reimbursement for windows keys) I'm used to APT but I think the switch won't be hard, thanks a lot!
You’re welcome! Hope it feels comfy for you and fits your needs.
Pop_OS has NVIDIA support out of the box. I know it comes with gnome, but it's fairly simple to install another DE. That's the route I ended up going, as an apt fan
I'll try Pop too, I've actually tried that on liveUSB on a desktop (not the best thing I know, it's a laptop distro) and I think their modified gnome isn't that bad, I think I might get used to it. The fact they use APT is a huge plus IMO, I'm used to it.
I've been daily driving Nobara for almost 2 years now, and I love it, but I don't know if I'd call it noob friendly. Especially over the last several months, it's got a lot of little quirks and issues that can break the system if you're not keeping up with the Discord. For example, the KDE/Gnome graphical package managers are still included with the distro, but actually using them to update the system when they bug you about there being updates will cause problems. Bugged kernels and other packages get pushed out often enough that I don't update my system anymore without doing some research on the Discord channel first. I actually haven't updated in over a month now because the entire 6.4 kernel branch has just been issue after issue, haha.
It's probably the best distro out there for my needs and I'd love to recommend it but it's just got too many issues for me to recommend to a Linux novice in good conscience.
I’m very much a noob. Personally found Nobara easier to install and maintain than Ubuntu/Arch and derivatives. Always went back to windows in frustration until Nobara. Fully aware that I may be a lucky anomaly. Whether using the startup pop up thingy to update or Discover I haven’t had any broken updates or kernels. Sometimes I still run NobaraPackageManager bauh or yumex and it hasn’t broken anything. Never check the discord. I subbed to the reddit comm before leaving for lemmy so sometimes saw it on my feed but didn’t check it. The one quirk is it doesn’t seem to have an upgrade notification, but even running old versions for months hasn’t had anything break so far.
Appreciate you adding to this, though! My noob experience of ‘it just works’ without needing to be involved in the community is apparently not universal. I first tried it after hearing that the dev puts it on his non-techy father’s computer for ease of use and low maintenance, which has been my experience so far. But I wouldn’t want to recommend something that didn’t work. Sorry it’s been giving you problems, wasn’t aware as I don’t keep up with that stuff.
Glad you've had a good experience with it! My experience was also "it just works" up until April or so too. YMMV. I'm hopeful that it'll get there again, just been a rough few months especially for AMD CPUs and GPUs. Kernel 6.5 should at least put the AMD fTPM issues that have plagued us since 6.2 or so to rest finally.