cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16072674
I've been quite happy with my Steam Deck - both as a gaming console and as a secondary computer when it's docked, but for newer titles I picked up a Rog Zephyrus M16 (2023) last year.
Now that Windows is going off the deep end with AI, I'm looking to dual boot/trial Linux on this laptop with the goal to give Microsoft the boot.
It's a beefy laptop:
- 13th Gen i9-13900
- 32GB Memory
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070
- 1TB NVMe (Windows)
- 2TB NVMe (Linux)
I added the second drive to avoid any issues with dual-booting with Grub/Windows Bootloader - instead making the Linux device the primary boot device and spamming Esc if I want to change to the Windows drive.
For distributions, I'm most familiar with Debian/Ubuntu - it's the daily driver for my work laptop, and the vast majority of my home lab VMs are Ubuntu. With the Steam Deck, I started to get more into Arch with the Steam Deck, and now it's the OS of choice for my HTPCs for simple streaming/Plex media player. I've also messed around with ZorinOS (basically a fancy skinned Ubuntu).
I need some advice on what to throw on this laptop - and some suggestions on how to squeeze the best performance out of this (Optimus vs. Proprietary NVIDIA vs. Open source drivers).
This is a great time to try!
Personally, I was in the same boat. I have landed on Pop! OS for my daily driver: https://pop.system76.com/
I dealt with Ubuntu, trying to get NVIdia drivers to work, no native flatpak, etc etc. PopOS has an NVidia version with the drivers baked in already, and apps just... work. It has been the lowest annoyance distro I've ever used, and I can't recommend it enough.
(I do gaming, AI stuff, coding, pretty much anything I've had to do Pop! has done a great job)
I don't game much but I'd try to stay closer to the debian ecosystem, or one of the more well-known distros. There are a lot of cases where there's a debian and ubuntu installer for something and otherwise you gotta compile or hope for an appimage or flatpak. Ubuntu's out because snaps are horrible, although you can get rid of those. Personally I install debian on all my boxes. It's a really minimal distro and things tend to go pretty fast because of that. Debian or I hear Fedora's great.
Same here, ditched windows 6 months ago, wanted to squeeze every bit of performance out of linux, landed at cachyos. Loving it.
Oh, I think CachyOS looks interesting - I'll try that one first. Thanks!
Since you have Nvidia you'll want to use the Nvidia proprietary drivers for the best performance. The open source driver for Nvidia (nouveau) is awful when it comes to gaming performance, unfortunately. (Although this will soon be fixed with NVK)
Depending on your distro of choice, you'll need to figure out whether you want Secure Boot on or not. I believe Windows 10 doesn't require Secure Boot to be enabled, but I think Windows 11 does. So depending on how frequent you want to be booting into Windows this might be a bit of an annoyance. You can leave Secure Boot disabled and use the Nvidia Proprietary drivers as-is, but if you want to enable Secure Boot you'll have to sign the Kernel yourself - it's a pretty straight forward process.
I recommend you try to keep Secure Boot enabled for the added benefit of security and ease of use when dual-booting, but if you don't want to go through the hassle of signing your own Kernel, then simply leaving Secure Boot disabled when in Linux will suffice.
I recommend against using Ubuntu because of Canonical's many poor decisions with Ubuntu. I won't get into it right now, but if you're comfortable with Ubuntu don't let me stop you from using it.
In reality, you can use whatever distro you want. One distro isn't inherently better at gaming then another. It's a matter of configuration.
