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.
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The tutorial on how to do so is, well outdated.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Tho I made the mistake to use an outdated tutorial on how to install nvidia drivers for fedora.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.