Yeah. It’s another one of these. But! Here me out! So I have some experience using Linux. Run some VMs for services I run in my home, I switched my surface book 3 (funnily enough) to ubuntu for my work computer as I was getting more and more frustrated by windows 11 and it turned out really good. Was able to completely get off windows and i didn’t miss out on anything. Now. Ive been trying to migrate my gaming rig to Linux with… Not a lot of success. I have 3 monitors plugged into it, a Samsung crg49 and then 2 small no name brand monitors I like for websites and discord and stuff while I play on the Samsung monitor. On windows it works flawlessly. No Linux distro I’ve used has been able to handle it and I’m not sure how I should be approaching this. Running games has been fine. I use lutris and have been able to play pretty much everything I’ve wanted to with some tweaking. But whether a few hours or a few days, eventually I start having issues with the displays. Monitors will black out. Not boot. Eventually the whole system just stops working in a way that I can figure out. I have a ryzen 3700x, and a Nvidia 2080ti. 64GB of RAM. all my storage is nvme. I have tried most major distros. Mostly Ubuntu is what I have experience with. I have tried some others like nobara, but performance was awful, and display management was an issue. Ive never really installed other desktop environments other than what comes with those distros, so if it’s a matter of “use distro x, but you need to install weyland” then sure. Just let me know that’s something I need to do. 😋 So… What do you suggest I run? I really dont want to go back to windoze. It’s just awful these days.
Once again for gaming I’ll vouch for Nobara, not because I’ve tried too much else but everything just worked out of the box. No monitor issues, no driver problems, fixes, patches and tweaks pre-applied. Just all around a good experience.
Don’t use Wayland. I’ve had a very awful experience with Wayland and external monitors on an Nvidia with the proprietary driver. Because Wayland is the default in most modern distros it might be that all of the ones you tried used it. Try Linux Mint Cinnamon edition, it’s using X11 as the default and it’s Ubuntu based so it should be familiar grounds.
Yeah. Wayland + Nvidia seems to = sadness it seems. Might be worth a go.
Can you list the distros that you tried?
Monitor handling will mostly depend on the desktop environment and X11/Wayland, but different distros will ship with different defaults for these.
Ubuntu and Nobara both come with the GNOME desktop environment, which uses Wayland by default.
If you’ve tried anything with e.g. KDE Plasma as the desktop environment, that would already tell us a bit more…
Ive tried nobara, I’ve tried Ubuntu, I’ve tried popOS, and I think also tried mint. I’m not 100% sure on that one tho… I feel like alot of my attempts have just blurred together at his point…
Well, Pop!_OS uses COSMIC, which is a customized GNOME, and Linux Mint uses Cinnamon, which is kind of GNOME under the hood, too. (In technical terms, Cinnamon is a “fork” of GNOME.)
So, yeah, that doesn’t allow ruling out that you’re always running into the same bug.
You should still try what the others are suggesting, though, before you go reinstalling or installing a different desktop environment. You’re certainly not the first person to use GNOME et al with 3 monitors. This should work.
Honestly the desktop environments is where I kinda get spacey with linux. The cli makes sense to me. Installing different desktops hasn’t been very successful for me. Which distros use KDE plasma?
You can kind of think of a desktop environment as everything that’s needed to turn a server OS (which has only a CLI interface) into a desktop OS.
So, it contains (or pulls in) all the stuff for displaying any graphics at all, but then also a panel/taskbar, audio support, icons, global keyboard shortcuts like Alt+Tab, a settings menu and some utility programs like a file manager, a text editor, a calculator etc…
Switching desktop environments is kind of like switching between Windows 7 and Windows 8.
You can still run the same programs, all the CLI stuff and OS internals work the same, but the UX for interacting with that is different. Admittedly, though, different desktop environments usually have more differences than there are between Windows 7 and 8.As for KDE Plasma, it’s available on lots of distros, but to name a few:
- Kubuntu is just Ubuntu with KDE preinstalled.
- Nobara has a KDE version.
- Personally, I’m on openSUSE. It is a somewhat more niche distro, relatively different from Ubuntu and Fedora. They really make KDE shine, though (with lots of detail work).
I always opt for Pop!_OS if NVidia is in the mix.
and a Nvidia 2080ti
Do you know which Nvidia driver you’re using currently?
There’s an established open-source Nouveau driver that Ubuntu & Mint probably defaulted to, a bleeding-edge open-source NVK driver that is still very early in it’s development, and a proprietary Nvidia driver that Nobara probably tried, as it’s kinda what you’d want for gaming.
The other question would be if you’re using Wayland or X11 underneath your desktop environment?
It should be listed in
Settings > System > System Details, under the heading “Windowing System” if you’re using GNOME.Wayland has better multi-monitor support than X11, but the proprietary Nvidia driver has a few teething problems with Wayland at the moment - a new 555 beta driver update should be coming this week with proper fixes for the sync/screen-tearing issues people have been experiencing.
I never used the nouveau driver. Always the proprietary or the one bundled with nobara. One of my first headaches under proxmox was gpu pass through on a Nvidia card that necessitated blowing away all the nouveau drivers in the system. Basically scared me away from every using it. 😋
Have you tried Mint, specifically LMDE¹? It (Mostly) Just Works™ like Ubuntu, but without the Canonical baggage. It handled my weird Lenovo Carbon X1 slate out of the box. Stable like Debian, progressive like Debian isn’t.
¹ Linux Mint Debian Edition
Never tried that one. Might be worth a go.
Try Fedora’s KDE spin (which uses Wayland).
I always thought it has the best hardware support.
I run a dual monitor setup, with no issues, and game often.
All distros are free – just choose whatever you find interesting, give it a spin, see what happens.
The monitors blacking out and the system not booting is suspicious.
I think you’ve said you tried a few distros. Does the exact same behaviour happen on all distros?
If possible, I would suggest giving it all another go with x11 instead of Wayland. Nvidia is still the worst for using with Wayland. It’s gotten a lot better, and it’s almost there for complete support, but there are still some issues here and there.
Kinda the conclusion I reached as well. Next build I intend to go with Radeon specially so i can try and get rid of windows but that’s not really in the budget right now
