Hello,
Basically I want to pick a distro and like most beginners I’m coming from windows. I don’t want to go on a full learning process from the start but I can probably handle some level of terminal usage. I, like most people play games(or thinking about playing games and it’s one of main things I’m looking into but because this isn’t the only thing I’m thinking of doing and do)
So here’s what I’m looking for to give a good idea,
-Can play steam games(since steam is compatible, this is mostly always checked(I think))
-Can play other games outside steam(like from GOG where you download the setup. Heard about apps like “bottles” but idk how good it will be)
-Video editing softwares (Resolve works but I might want to use another)
-Can run a CAD software(I do like designing and stuff so I do look forward for this(I have used some on windows and don’t know how its will be in linux. I know blender works but it’s more of a modeling than CAD))
-Programming(I don’t think this will be a problem)
-Microsoft like apps(Spreadsheet and stuff, Just need to be able to do work)
-Not sure if this is needed but I do sail the seven seas sometimes
My laptop has these if details are needed for compatibility
-GTX 1050(dedicated)
-intel i7 8th gen
-Intel UHD 630(integrated)
I heard a distro called “Pop! OS” which supports Nvidia GPUs but I also wanna know how intel stuff works too(cpu and Igraphics) It will be helpful if I can get details on how much change of performance I might have(increment or decrement as my pc is pretty weak) I just need your recommended OS and a brief explanation on what to look for in the OS and what to expect on the stuff I looked into (I’ll try doing my research according to your recommendations)\
Apologies if this is another “recommend me an OS” post, I do see all gaming related stuff but just doesn’t see much of the things that I look for
Thank you for reading!
I know it has been mentioned in passing a few times but I would highly recommend CachyOS. Just to emphasize how good that is.
Avoid Mint.
If you’re comming from Windows and don’t want to be too much distabilized ZorinOS is probably one of the best.
Other great choice are:
- bazzite
- Linux Mint
- Pop_OS!
However CAD on Linux is not great, there is some free tools but they are so much more limited than the proprietary windows suite of tools. Maybe WinBoat could make your software run good enough.
I’m extremely happy with bazzite, it’s basically impossible to break, and great for gaming.
Just be aware that it is very focused on flatpaks, so installing anything that doesn’t have a flatpak version does require some extra steps.
And for beginners, a flatpak is a particular way of bundling software so that:
A) all of the dependencies come with the program so you can just download one thing and run it
and
B) it has some level of sandboxing, which means you have some level of control over what the software you downloaded has access to on your machine. In theory.
So what they’re saying is that if some software you want isn’t already bundled as a flatpak, you’re going to have a hard time with bazzite, as it’s geared around making flatpaks easy, and requires more work to install things using other methods. Still works, just not as easy.
First thing I wanna implore you do is create a separate partition on your boot drive for your /home folder. Distro hopping is super normal when you’re starting out, and by separating your home folder makes distro hopping very easy.
Bazzite, like others suggested, is your best bet at a first attempt because it’s much harder to cause irreparable damage with a stray terminal command.
All of the apps you listed should work just fine under Linux. Bazzite ships with Steam and Lutris (it’s a game store aggregator) to get you started with gaming. Use Microsoft 365 online or one of the open sourced alternatives like libreoffice for office apps. The rest of the programs should either be able to be run with wine/bottles/WinApps.
A 1050 is kinda paltry by today’s standards, so just don’t expect a big bump in gaming performance or super snappy emulation.
If you are coming from Windows, I would say Mint for sure. I have friends that are 20 using it and my parents in their 70’s use it. Both seem to like it and even find it easier to use in quite a few respects.
since you’re on a laptop with a dedicated nvidia GPU DO NOT use Mint, Ubuntu, or hell anything Debian based. it won’t go well for you.
As other’s have said Nobara, Bazzite, Cachy, or Pop
Deb based on nvidia always went well for me.
* Shrug *
I ran pure Devuan for a couple years on such hardware. (Besides that, all Suse, Sabayon, Gentoo, BedrockLinux, VoidLinux, all happy, did go well.).
I don’t know why people keep saying this. I wonder if it’s an old thing? I’ve got three people with dedicated Nvidia gpus on mint and they’re just fine. The driver manager just works.
I’m using Mint with a 3060 on my PC, and my wife has Mint installed with one of the very old low powered cards, a gt 710 I think. Neither of us have had problems with them 🤷🏻♂️
Well Mint is technically fine, right? Their Nvidia support is 1st party, so it should work out of the box.
Pretty sure Ubuntu does too.
Debian, specifically, does not though. And I’m not sure how ‘behind’ Mint and Ubuntu are on their DE and Nvidia driver packages these days, which could be an issue sometimes. But I think many remember Ubuntu/Mint from older days when they were worse in this regard.
Isnt Pop_OS in the Debian family since its based on Ubuntu?
Check out Distrosea. Its a website where you can test different Linux distros, before installing anything.
Woah, that’s wild. If you run the browser in fullscreen mode (F11) it’s almost like you’re running it on your own machine. Pretty cool service.
Linux Mint
Don’t use fucking linux mint for playing video games, are you guys insane or just bots?
let’s go over some cons of linux mint again for the unitiated
-ancient packages -installing a separate ppa for graphics drivers that BRICKS YOUR SYSTEM if you don’t remove it before every update and then reinstall it -completely garbage dpkg based package manager that makes everything harder than it needs to be
just use nobara, endeavor, fedora, or arch if you’re feeling daring. I swear I see at least one person recommending mint to beginners for every one of these posts even though the distro is complete trash
I am not here to defend mint, never used it, but saying that a graphic driver can brick your system is spreading misinformation.
Bricking is very serious and means that your device becomes as useful as a brick. It can happen when damaging the hardware or firmware.
It seems you had a bad experience with graphic driver, this is 99% of the time the responsibility/fault of the GPU manufacturer (I guess Nvidia for you, AMD is not that friendly either). At worse you plug a bootable USB to recover your files and reinstall Linux.
this is 11 years ago situation. there are still ppa requirements for Nvidia last time I checked but not for mesa.
I can’t read anything from that website but I trust you. It’s been a while I am away from debian based distro and digging a bit : the problem is not that you need a ppa but you want the very latest version of the driver. You can have your reasons for that.
Mesa drivers are properly packaged from debian and forks alike. Going out of this way to install package from unknown people/org has its risk indeed. If newer GPU/graphics chipset would need newer driver I still make a point that this should be the manufacturer responsibility and not community to work from opaque implementation.
I can’t understand why Mint is still recommended there are so many better alternatives
Others have answered your question but nobody’s mentioned GNOME so I think I should.
Most distros have the option to install with GNOME or KDE (or a different one). Never pick GNOME. GNOME is very “my way or the highway” desktop and it’s way is to emulate an iPhone.
I wouldn’t say never against a FOSS project. Some people do like GNOME. It’s the best to see for OP’s own eyes. They might like it or hate it. However one shouldn’t be prejudiced. Hate all you want after you tried and found weak points for your usage cases. Some popular distros use GNOME for a reason. Personally I find it too restrictive, but I don’t hate it. You would have rights to hate if it was the only DE around but you have tons of alternative options out there.
I run stock Ubuntu Gnome on one of my machines, and I have no idea what you’re talking about with “its way is to emulate an iPhone”.
I’m not a fanboi or anything, and it has a few things I think it could do better at, but it’s a pretty normal DE as far as I can tell?
Nobarra, Bazzite, or CachyOS.
I’d say Nobara or Bazzite are better for ‘I install it and it just works.’
Cachy is better for the learning aspect. It’s not hard, but there are more choices to make, and you’re closer to the Arch wiki and all its excellent resources/tutorials.
I am biased, as I run CachyOS and I love it. I also love how much stuff is in its repos, including everything you need to game optimally, and how easy CUDA is (which is part of what you need for CAD).
Whatever you choose, do not, I repeat DO NOT install Fedora, Debian, or anything that doesn’t explicitly support Nvidia laptops by default, out of the box, or you are in for a world of pain. If any guide starts with ‘install these 3rd party repos’ or so, you have entered a danger zone, and you will hate linux.
Just a reminder, there is 0 mainstream CAD software native to Linux. MAYBE you can get one of the mainstream software working on Linux. Or browser solutions like Onshape or TinkerCAD.
If you do programming and don’t want to go through hoops of containers and sandboxes, avoid immutable OS like Bazzite.
If you want to use your computer to finish projects, not starting a new project, avoid arch-based.
If you want “power user features” like right-clicking on a folder to open a terminal, avoid GNOME.
Your GPU is borderline getting dropped by official Nvidia driver btw.
I’ve used both Bazzite and Garuda. Both have an Nvidia install, both are gamer focused, and both have been easy.
Bazzite was immutable, which I ended up not liking.
May I ask:
Are these your first Linux experiences?
What is it about Bazzite that you didn’t like?I’m asking for future reference, I’ve got friends who are getting curious and to me Bazzite seems quite beginner-friendly, but I’m not a beginner so maybe I’m missing something
Yes, Bazzite was my first. Immutability sounds great in theory but it wouldn’t let me change my login screen background and wouldn’t explain why. I bricked my drive permissions trying to get access and had to reformat.
That got me looking for alternatives and I learned about immutability and found Garuda, which let me do whatever I wanted, was also gaming focused, and has great helper applications.
I recommend trying CachyOS. It’s easy to use and it works out of the box and offers great support for your type of hardware out of the box too. As for the use cases you need linux, it’s more about software that you run on linux and not the OS itself in most cases. Also I have same kind of hardware as you have and I’ve been experiencing major issues with fedora and fedora-based distros like Bazzite and Nobara. I’ve seen so many people there recommending those so beware!
I think one of the main reason you have some issues is because the hardware is pretty old. So the gaming based OSs might be good for running on newer hardware and ofc their performance is good which just decrease the overall impact on them compared to older hardware. I’ll look into Cachy OS, Thanks
Nope, 3060 RTX and Intel i5 11th gen is not that old in my opinion. I maybe needed to be more specific but when I said we have same kind of hardware I meant that we both have Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU. Many linux nerds can obviously argue with me, that it’s linux and you can fix everything yourself. But because you’re beginner, I understand you need something that works right out of the box at least without major issues. That’s why I warned you about fedora-based distros. Of course it’s better to test everything yourself and like one other comment said it’s okay to distro-hop a lot in the beginning, just not too much otherwise it will be overwhelming. I did distro-hop in the beggining too. I just found reasonable to share my personal experience because we both have same brand of GPU and CPU. And good luck with trying out CachyOS and other distros, I hope you find right distro for yourself.
Sorry for the misunderstanding. I thought you meant you had an older GPU like mine(GTX1050).
- Nobara
- Bazzite
- PopOS
- fedora
For more info, take a look at this
Thank you, I’ll look into it
Bazzite, built for gaming
Technically all distros support Nvidia since it’s a kernel thing, however some of them have better out of the box experience, so it would be wiser to go with one of those distros. For gaming, it’s usually better to have more recent drivers, if you play different varieties of games and some of them are newer titles. Though depending on the games, even Debian could be a suitable option.
If you don’t want to learn under-the-hood features, Bazzite could be a nice option for you. If you want familiarity with Windows, you might want to go with KDE as your desktop environment. However don’t be afraid of trying new angles if you like the general idea of a distro. So Pop!_OS might look different than Windows, it’s also a solid distro.
If you’ll need Microsoft programs or some Windows-only programs, choose something you can install Winboat on it, which isn’t currently usable for Bazzite, until the devs bring Podman support for it. Know that, Winboat is not the only interface you can install Windows programs, it just makes things much easier. So depending on the programs, Bazzite still could be a good option for you.
People here seem to recommend Arch-based distros but I wouldn’t start with them, at least until you get some familiarity with Linux in general. There is no problem using them, but a beginner couldn’t handle if something goes wrong after an update (usually happens with Nvidia). It does not happen a lot, but even once is enough for people who can’t handle it.
There is nothing wrong with Linux Mint. You might find it quite straightforward. It does not have the latest Nvidia drivers most of the time but this might not be a problem for you. If you play newer titles though, then it’s probably not the distro you would want.
