Is gaming the main use case? If so, I think the distro won’t be the biggest performance factor.
If gaming is not the case, I would ask myself this question: Is a desktop environment a must? Because you’d be surprised by how much you’re still able to do without one.
In that case I’d go for something very barebone. Get a minimalistic debian up and running, and see how that works. There are plenty of lightweight desktop environments (to the extent some of them count as desktop environments), where TWM is an extreme example.
Arch with LXQT, maybe? Then you can choose to install specifically what you want with minimal overhead. Another option is the minimal version of NixOS, but like Arch, you’d need to install a DE separately, and you’d need to learn how to use Nix.
But if it’s still struggling, might be best as an art piece or command line only, given that a Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 can be had for <$100 and neither struggles with lighter DEs or browsers.
Yep, with Linux being able to play most games (and growing) and Microsoft’s latest transgression, Linux seems like the logical bastion for anyone tired of features nobody asked for.
I’ll have to check her stuff out after work, but I at least followed her and Asahi Linux on Mastodon. Somebody was asking about Linux Distros that worked on Apple silicon the other day, and now I know of a Fedora Spin that could fit the bill!
I will warn you that her Live streams are really technical low level coding, though in her next stream she’ll be testing games and stuff so it’ll be a little bit more entertaining than usual.
If you’re interested in that kinda stuff, it’s a gold mine for learning and she does answer questions from the chat. Also, some pretty notable developers will show up to the live streams from time to time and hangout in chat.
I enjoy it. ☺️
I would keep in mind one thing with Nvidia. Their consumer GPU market is a drop in the bucket compared to their server, cloud and AI/ML markets. AMD dedicates real effort and resources to their hardware development and they don’t lock their features to their own platform. I’m still using a vega56 and haven’t really felt a need to upgrade because things like fsr just keep my card chugging along.
It’s true though…consumer graphics mean damn near nothing to them, their AI/ML profits shit all over your precious 4080’s and 4090’s in regards to straight profit for Nvidia.
They rehash the same chip over and over again each generation with minimal gains, increase the power requirements and cut out third party oems like EVGA. Give it a couple generations and I would bet they’ll only be selling the 4080/90 equivalents in the future and let intel or amd have the midrange and low range market, freeing up manufacturing for their AI/ML hardware. Doesn’t matter if it’s conjecture, the writing is on the wall. People are choosing to ignore it even though the market is flooded with low end Nvidia cards made to look like their low and midrange offerings aren’t selling. It’s only a matter of time, the consumer graphics market is a second class citizen for Nvidia.
I have a 3090 and just swapped over to the beta 555 drivers and Kwin with explicit sync patches applied (the patches will be available out of the box with Kwin 6.1). Honestly, the Wayland experience is basically flawless now for most cases. The only bug I am experiencing is Steam shows some corruption in the web views on start up until I resize the window, but it’s a minor quibble in exchange for getting Wayland. I expect most of the minor remaining issues to be hammered out quickly.
Honestly, I’ve had genuinely bad experiences with AMD. I hated my unstable Vega 64 that would crash almost every day and was much happier when I finally ditched that card for my 3090. My laptop has a Radeon 680M and that would regularly have hard system hangs, broken video acceleration, etc.
Besides that, I also think being part of the AMD ecosystem is difficult at times. FSR sucks compared to DLSS, raytracing is sub-par, there’s no path reconstruction equivalent. From a compute perspective, ROCm is unstable. Even running something as simple as Darktable with ROCm would cause half of each of my photos to not render out properly. Blender with Optix is much faster than Blender with AMD HIP. If you want to do AI, forget AMD as the ecosystem has basically gone with CUDA.
And yeah, the lack of HDMI 2.1 means no 4k 120Hz VRR on a wide variety of displays. Everyone says “why not display port”, but it is tough finding a DP capable monitor with the right specs and size sometimes. For example, try finding an equivalent of an LG C2 that has DP. There’s only one, its by Asus, and it costs $600 bucks more.
I’ll +1 the Fedora KDE for desktop usage and Debian for server usage … this combo is where I’ve landed after over a decade in the Linux space mixed with personal and professional usage.
I second this. I distro hopped for quite a while before I found Nobara and have stuck with it ever since. Based on Fedora, but with a bunch of fixes and QoL improvements. If you’re a gamer, I highly recommend Nobara. Created by the guy that made GE-Proton, so he def knows what he’s doing.
I tried nobara with my lappy and it just did not work with my GPU (gtx960m). No matter what i tried and installed it just wouldn’t work. I switched over to pop-os and it’s been working like a charm since. So YMMV with whatever os you try so don’t be afraid to switch it up to another if one isn’t doing it for you
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