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
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
Nobara is basically the normal Fedora Workstation edition with some improvements for online streamers. The downside is that it lacks behind in version updates. Unless you really very specifically need those modifications, I would just install regular Fedora. Personally I think the KDE spin is the nicest out of the box: https://fedoraproject.org/spins/kde/
It has external Nvidia driver and Steam repositories enabled by default for easy installation and you can also activate RPMfusion and Flathub repositories for more 3rd party software in the settings of the updater.
Huh, I was under the impression that Nobara was more of a change. Good to know! Steam support is definitely a plus too.
You can replicate the nobara distro by installing some software and switching some things, but there are some hurdles.
For example installing the codecs to be able to play proprietary or manage proprietary codecs for softwares which rely on the system to do so is a bit of a mess currently (vlc can read without the system) :
The tutorial on how to do so is, well outdated. It works until it doesn’t because it’s missing a command to switch from the fedora open source only ffmpeg to the one containing the proprietary software one.
After a bit of research I got to it, but it was a bit of a head scratching moment.
For the rest, well there are some modifications to the kernel too it seems, but the performance boost is still low.
For the rest well it’s software that can be easily installed (steam, wine and other related, …).
Tho I made the mistake to use an outdated tutorial on how to install nvidia drivers for fedora. In fact it’s very easy. I just had to install it from the store, the nvidia package… Tho it runs in hybrid mode by default, I think I installed an extension on gnome to easilly switch between these modes.
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.
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
I had a 970 and now a 3070. Used both with Kubuntu and they worked well enough but not on Wayland.
Note to self: avoid Wayland
I was considering trying out Hyprland as a first foray into tiling WMs, since it seemed relatively GUI-friendly, but I guess I’ll just go with i3
Well Wayland support and performance may vary. For Wayland to work well on nvidia the most recent software is needed.
Wayland support would get better with a bit more time. Wine has pushed updates in the latest versions for better Wayland support.
For gaming, X11 would work maybe a bit better for performance, however it could also have evolved fast and performance of Xwayland be better rn.
I wouldn’t say you need to avoid Wayland, but rather test how it works. On distros shipping Wayland and X11, you can often switch between them at the login screen.
For nobara, well it would be interesting and an “easy” start to fedora. Tho I tried to install it, and I never got to boot into it, while I installed fedora without any issues. Not sure if I made a mistake or an incompatibility with my laptop.
The issue with fedora, is that software without gui aren’t available in the gnome store. And only installable though command line with dnf or flatpak. Also the fedora forum help online is a bit of a desert, or soo old that it doesn’t apply anymore. Tho it could have evolved since I tried it. However the fedora support page is pretty good, tho it is missing some things on first install for some things. However Nobara would have already got all those issues dealt with.
If you have no experience with Linux, I’ll suggest to first discover with a distro, then when you feel a bit more comfortable to try other compositors. Using non “common” compositors may create bugs which may not be very much discussed online. So it can be a bit discouraging for a new user.
Thanks for all the info! My only experience so far has been with Ubuntu, so I’m cautiously branching out. Experimenting with WMs is definitely something I’m going to do later; I don’t think I’m quite there yet :P
Ubuntu is a bit of a between good and meh distro nowadays : It is well maintained and up to date enough, with the gnome desktop. So good enough.
However they push their own “proprietary” (at least for the servers), packaging format : snap. Currently it’s OK, but also a security nightmare.
Anyone can put software on there, it is not checked for malware, and there is very little official support from devs, so often it’s community packages, which obviously aren’t to be always trusted.
There are a bit similar issues with flatpak. But at least it’s open source. Tho not sure on how the official flatpak repo is checked for malware, if it even is.
For native packages (apt-get for Ubuntu as example) (not in their snap or flatpak containers), it is often maintained by trusted people in the community or companies. So the software is checked and more trustworthy.
Linux mint and pop os are based on Ubuntu, and so also use apt. But they don’t force snap packages if you like to stay on something you experimented with.
Other distros like fedora (or nobara) can use other packaging formats. Dnf for them. It works about the same, however as they don’t use the same packaging, they are not directly compatible with .deb files (often proposed by companies which software wasn’t put in a repo).
However, the flatpak community is also often here to get all these things working smoother. So for example discord isn’t available natively on fedora, but it is available from in flatpak.
Wayland with KDE is fine these days on Nvidia. On more exotic setups it might still cause some problems though.
It works better with newer cards. I am currently using Wayland on my 3090 and it works about 75% of the way I want it to. Occasionally the taskbar and/or system clock will freeze, which is fixed by a relog. Also the translucency in themes does not render properly, but that’s a small price to pay for full refresh rates across varied monitors.
I have a laptop with a 1650 and because it’s kind of a weird half-niche card, Wayland does not work well with it forcing me to stick with X.
Panel freeze is a known KDE bug on non-Intel GPUs. It’s fixed in Plasma 6, avoid it on Plasma 5 by disabling window previews for the panel.
I have an Nvidia 3080 and use Ubuntu. It auto installed the Nvidia driver and works well with Steam.
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
