I totally can’t help with the visual impairment, and I’m sorry about that. My sister is mostly blind, but not a gamer.
I have been able to play Steam games on Ubuntu and thus far haven’t had any problems, but I haven’t stressed my system with AAA games, either, because I typically play those on console. That’s all I’ve got, sorry. Good luck!
Linux handles a 7800X3D in the ASUS TUF Gaming B650-Plus just fine, and since the motherboard in your bundle is almost the same, I would expect that to work well, too.
Some of the early BIOS versions on AM5 boards caused hardware damage if EXPO was enabled, and Asus was one of the affected brands. Updated BIOS versions with sensible VSoC limits have been available for quite a while now. I suggest updating the BIOS soon after you have your system running, just in case you get old stock. Rest assured that just booting up with default settings won’t fry it, even if it has an old BIOS.
Asus boards are among the few that officially support ECC RAM, which is nice if that’s important to you.
Asus warranty support for their video cards and ROG Ally have been particularly bad lately. I don’t know if their motherboard support has the same problems. (I’ve never had to RMA a motherboard.)
I have a GeForce RTX 3070 which I will keep and I am running Linux Mint 21.2. Any thoughts on compatibility?
AMD GPUs are better supported and better integrated with linux, so you might consider one next time you upgrade, but the GeForce card you already have ought to work fine for gaming and basic desktop stuff (once you install Nvidia’s proprietary drivers).
I have a Gigabyte B650 skew and I’m happy with it, I think the X670’s are overpriced for general use tbh and the 7800X3D was my first choice but it was way too expensive where I live so I got the 7900x. I’m not sure if its still a thing but when I was buying last year, it was recommended to go with 6000 or lower speeds for AMD CPUs for better stability so that should be fine for you.
I’m in Europe so I can’t comment on value because its completely different over here and also Microcenter is auto blocking me anyway lol
There was an issue with Over Current Protection on AM5 motherboards when EXPO is enabled that can cause the CPU (especially X3D) to die.
TBH I usually wouldn’t recommend one vendor over another when it comes to motherboards because realistically nobody spends much time in the BIOS anyway, I’d just suggest the one that has the features you actually want but as the other comment pointed out Asus has been pretty crappy with customer repairs and warranty stuff so it might be worth spending a little bit more in case you do have an issue down the line but that’s completely up to you, I have no idea if Gigabyte is better to deal with than Asus, but I do remember they had issues with exploding PSUs before lol
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.
If you like the interface of the steam deck in desktop mode and you are most familiar with Ubuntu, you could try Kubuntu… which is just Ubuntu with the KDE desktop environment like what the deck has. Theres also the KDE Fedora spin. If you do want to go the Arch route you could install EndeavourOS, which is practically arch with a little bit of hand holding to get you on your feet quickly - and to help you learn the ropes.
I’d suggest Fedora or Arch. Debian and Ubuntu are definitely solid options, but if you have experience with them and want something new, those first two distros are both fantastic and both stay up to date with fast release cycles. They might be a little less stable because of that, but that’s kind of Debian and it’s downstream options wheelhouse. So I’d use your preference on that to help guide your eventual preferred distro.
For Nvidia GPU, if u want squeeze the most out of it during gaming. I think there is 2 best options Bazzite(it is immutable so it will be really hard to break) or Nobara. Both of them is fedora base, so unfortunately your familiar with Debian based will not do much.
I need some advice on what to throw on this laptop - and some suggestions on how to squeeze the best performance out of this (Optimus vs. Proprietary NVIDIA vs. Open source drivers).
Optimus isn’t a driver, but a way for the laptop to use both the integrated graphics and the discreet card. It doesn’t work well with Linux so you’ll want to disable it in EFI. This will increase heat and energy use.
If you do end up wanting to use Optimus, the Arch wiki has a lot of good information. You should use the proprietary driver in nearly all cases.
As far as distros, take a look at Bazzite, it’s a gaming-focused distro and similar to the steam deck’s OS.
You didn’t list your distro, but I had the same issue on Pop!_OS. I fixed it by modifying the ALSA properties in /usr/share/wireplumber/main.lua.d/50-alsa-config.lua. I’d first try uncommenting headroom and changing it to 1024, then logging out and back in. If that doesn’t work, go 2048. If that still doesn’t work, then I’d maybe try adjusting period-size.
For me, a value in the ~1200 range for headroom fixed it completely. But it will entirely depend on your sound card/hardware. And note, these values will probably be overwritten with any wireplummer updates.
Also keep in mind, increasing headroom will increase audio latency, so try not to increase it too drastically.
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