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!

  • JAdsel@lemmy.wtfEnglish
    2·
    19 hours ago

    NVIDIA mostly does fine with Wayland now IME. Running KDE Wayland on a Legion Slim 5 with RTX 4060 myself for over a year now, with minimal problems after the NVIDIA 550+ drivers came out.

    I did have definite problems, including on X11, with the 535 drivers that the Debian repos were still using at last check. Your best bet is probably to install the latest drivers straight from NVIDIA’s repos: https://docs.nvidia.com/datacenter/tesla/driver-installation-guide/index.html

    That’s what I ended up doing on a Debian-based distro, and it pretty much fixed my issues. There are specific instructions linked there for different supported distros.

    My daily driver now is Garuda, which is essentially just Arch with a GUI installer and some extremely handy extra user-friendly tools bolted on. It’s aimed at gaming, and so makes it extra easy to get the drivers set up and kept up to date. That is basically why I decided to give their installer a go in the first place after I got this laptop, to at least let it run hardware detection and see how it was configuring things, to tell where I might have been going wrong in my then-main distro. Then I liked the experience enough that I stuck around. It mostly just works.

    Note: This would be from someone with experience on Arch. If you’re not cool with rolling releases, that may not be a good choice. Garuda does default to a BTRFS/Snapper setup that makes it easy to just boot into a previous snapshot if anything does break, which does come in handy occasionally.

    But, as other commenters have already said? The distro itself doesn’t really matter. That’s mainly just down to personal taste. The important part here is getting the right drivers and configuration going on whatever you do prefer to use. Some distros just make this easier than others