Hi all,
The quick and dirty questions is: Which distro should I try next?
I tried Debian X11 and Fedora with Wayland, but I did not have a great experience with them for my Lenovo Legion 5 Pro RTX3060. I installed proprietary drivers on both systems since people say that they’re better than Nouveau, but the framerate stutters even in simple browser game.
I use some software to slice 3d models for printing, and that one stuttered too. I tried various fixes but none of them worked, and I’d really like to switch to Linux from Microsoft for my daily driver.
What distro can I use to have a better experience? Any advice is welcome, but please make it as specific as possible and if you can, address why that distro would be better than Debian 12 and Fedora 42.
Thanks in advance!
Distros are a red herring. I used debian 12 (first gnome, then xfce) for more than a year with no problems, and the current version of Bazzite is also problem-free for me when it comes to nvidia prime (apart from a KDE-specific memory leak). Basically, this should be easily fixable without a fresh install.
I don’t know what distro you’re on atm, but set up prime-run and try running programs with that. I also recommend going onto the uefi and disabling secure boot. You can get it to work with proprietary nvidia drivers, but it’s a bit of a process and unless you really need it you might as well leave it off for now.
It’s not your fault because with nvidia gpu you have to add env variables to tell your pc that use nvidia prime, no matter what distro you use you have to configure env varibales, although I’ll suggest you openSUSE-Tumbleweed and I was going to suggest you Fedora but you had problems so it’s ok.
Check the lenovo legión discord server, there is a linux channel and they can help you better than here probably
Interesting, thanks! Do you happen to have a link to it?
nvidia stutters on linux for me too and there was nothing i could do to fix. its better on x11.
ive also seen plenty of weird issues on nvidia laptops with switchable graphics.
please tell me if you ever find a solution.
It’s still Fedora under the hood, but Nobara has a pile of graphics tweaks to enable video editing and gaming, by the developer of the Proton layer that Valve uses for Steam. It’s optimized for high end graphics and nVidia cards.
This could be an issue where the AMD GPU is only being used. I, like some of the others would suggest Linux Mint.
a distribution is just an assortment of packages, it’s the same linux + driver underneath. nvidia on linux is a headache. are there people who made it work? sure. is that a worthwhile waste of your time? it is not.
get hardware that’s linux supported and you’ll have plenty of challenges during the transition, you don’t need the additional “self destruction in…” countdown timer booming from the speakers.
if you still wanna have at it, pop_os (however it’s spelt), bazzite and nobara are some od the distros that have dedicated nvidia install images and are thusly more likely to work OOB and work better afterwards.
My spouse has a laptop from Asus with VERY similar Specs (but an RTX 3050ti instead of a 3060) and so far Linux Mint has been a pretty trouble -free experience with ONE condition:
I set it to use the dedicated nvidia gpu 24/7 as opposed to the integrated AMD gpu. I forgot what exactly was happening but if memory serves it was disrupting something, I think recovering from closing the lid?
After doing that we’ve never had an issue again. They mostly use at their desk plugged in, sp the power usage isn’t much a concern.
Hope this helps!
Was it hard to set it to always use the dedicated gpu?
I don’t remember it being particularly difficult, I’m a bit of a linux newb myself, but I’d be lying if I said I remember which steps I took off the top of my head.
Try Ubuntu, it has a user friendly GUI for installing Nvidia and other 3 parts drivers.
Okay, I had the same problem with a 3060 laptop. The easy answer is : your next distro should be Nobara.
These errors happen because your computer does not use your Nvidia GPU but the AMD one. There is no hardware acceleration.
In Nobara, everything comes preinstalled and preconfigured. I didn’t have those problems anymore.
(If you fancy masochism, you can also go the Arch or NixOS way)
Thanks! I’m downloading nobara now, any tips to get it to work as expected?
None ! That’s the greatest thing. Take the time to read the welcome message (you know that window that come when you first boot any distro) and follow any instruction. It should work out of the box.
Only shame is that they don’t recommend dual hooting with windows, which is a requirement for me
You should be able to do it. I dual booted nobara / arch / windows in the beginning
I have a desktop which has / had a similar problem.
Originally I built it with a g-series Ryzen which has integrated Radeon Vega graphics. Upgraded to a 3060 and wanted to run Linux for gaming instead of windows.
I couldn’t get a distro to reliably use my graphics card without the issues you describe. Stuttering, crashing, generally unusable.
Garuda was the answer (to be fair I’d try Bazzite too but I just didn’t get there as Garuda worked). In fact, it worked out of the box for me and I enjoyed it so much I made it my work OS.
I like the GUI utilities they’ve made for front-ending a bunch of Arch CLI utilities and I’ve been saved by BTRFS snapshots more than once.
