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’m on Pop OS and have very little issue with Nvidia drivers.
Same here. I’ve been on Pop OS for the past three years with a GTX 980ti, and have only had a few driver issues that were easily fixed. There’s usually a guide on how to fix it on System76’s homepage soon after the issue is discovered. Generally I’ve been very happy running Pop on my gaming rig. I’ve tried other distros (Manjaro and Garuda) but Pop has been the one to stay installed the longest.
Dude what are your requirements as such. Do you want to tinker or do you want a system with as low maintenance as possible at the cost of configurability¿? Are most of your games on steam¿? Is there some software you absolutely need¿? Answers to these questions will help a lot in giving you recommendations
I have an Nvidia 3080 and use Ubuntu. It auto installed the Nvidia driver and works well with Steam.
I recommend Bazzite, been daily driving it on my Steam Deck and it’s been great. It’s not that far off from being Nobara’s immutable cousin so you get a pretty up to date Fedora base with user friendly but powerful gaming specific tweaks and can pick (and switch between at any time) either Gnome or KDE Plasma variants.
Due to its immutable nature, you get pretty much risk free updates and if something does break, rolling back is as easy as picking a different item at boot time. It keeps everything updated with minimal interaction, OS updates happen in the background and apply the next time you reboot, user apps just keep themselves updated. Oh and it has a NVIDIA iso with the drivers baked in so you don’t need to do anything special to enable them.
The one question mark is Optimus support, not sure if it’s actually in but I’d guess it works since it’s got some laptop specific builds. Might be worth a try.
Edit: I just remembered they do have Asus specific builds as well
For less work and nice interface on a laptop, I can suggest Pop OS. Tho you would still need to install software and tools.
It is using gnome, but you can install extensions to change how the desktop appears.
Gnome is pretty good for laptops and supports gestures pretty well.
Pop os has already installed extensions allowing switching for optimus and they have an ISO with nvidia drivers already installed.
How optimus switching works on Linux is : There are 3 modes :
- integrated (nvidia disabled)
- hybrid (intel used, Nvidia available at very low power constantly. Nvidia gpus cannot be disabled in this mode. It uses more power than integrated becauset the nvidia gpu is running at low power)
- dedicated (nvidia gpu, highest power consumption)
In hybrid mode, When you want to use the nvidia gpu in games or something which cannot auto detect the gpus in it’s configuration, you need to launch it with an argument to get it to run on the nvidia gpu.
For games, i suggest to use proton-ge on steam, by enabling the compatibility in the settings. Proton-ge has enhancements compared to default proton with automatic launch of gamemode (additional software to be installed), already integrated fsr 1… It is also available for other software (heroic launcher (gui for legendary)/legendary (epic games & gog) with Wine-GE, and specific versions for Lutris…
For garuda Linux, when i tried it, it was a trash experience. I wasn’t even able to install wine because it wanted to remove the audio driver (pipewire if I remember), and obviously not tested by the devs. Wine was installing perfectly fine on other distros.
And as said in another comment, no idea for nobara, I couldn’t boot into it.
As other comments suggested too, Linux mint is a good one too. The switch between gpu config isn’t made through the power menu, but through the nvidia panel for that distro.
However I don’t like it very much for dual booting, because even if I make another efi partition, it still writes to the windows partition. So when I delete the linux mint partitions, I still have a Linux mint entry lingering in the bios. I uses cinnamon as a desktop. It works great too. Tho not sure how well it got updated to gestures compared to gnome.
