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!
That’s odd, I remember using Debian 12 without this issue when it was released, I later switched to an Arch based distro (Endeavour OS) to experiment with how it would run games (they ran better, I think some games were freezing on Debian 12 stable).
I can’t say anything about Fedora, never used it.
Do you have more information about the specific driver you installed on Debian 12 and Fedora 42? Like the version number? Maybe the neofetch result of your computer specs too.
Sorry for not being able to give more details.
This could be an issue where the AMD GPU is only being used. I, like some of the others would suggest Linux Mint.
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?
Did you make sure that Nouveau was not loading? If both drivers are on the system, Nouveau usually ends up taking precedence unless it’s been blacklisted. Also, if this is a laptop type with a hybrid graphics setup, you may need additional software to manage the handoff between GPUs (optimus, bumblebee, etc.)
I’ve done some more digging and indeed, the AMD integrated GPU is being used. Optimus seems like a good option, but then apparently I’d have to use x11 as the desktop renderer because Wayland doesn’t play nice with nvidia.
As far as I can see, x11 will be deprecated not too long from now?
OP, as someone who has a very similarly specced laptop:
Install Linux Mint, do a one click install of the Nvidia driver with the mint GUI driver installer, and then open the application that’s stuttering from your start menu by right clicking on it, and select ‘run with discrete GPU’, which will force it to use your Nvidia card.
Mark my words, X11 will still be around as an option 10 years from now.
Linux Mint, probably the most popular distro, doesn’t even support Wayland in its default configuration, yet.Wayland’s nvidia support is improving over time, but although it’s becoming less popular, X11 isn’t likely to be completely deprecated anytime soon—I’d expect any mainstream distro to still at least have it as an option a couple of years from now, to handle corner cases Wayland still doesn’t support.
The last X11 stable version bump on my distro was about a month ago, to 21.1.16, so it isn’t like it’s abandonware or anything.
Like others suggested here, the problem is probably nouveau and you might want to try a gaming-oriented distro which usually configure these things correctly out-of-the-box. My favourite is Nobara and Fedora (which didn’t work for you but works for me because I have different hardware). People suggest Bazzite, but I cannot recommend it because it’s based on Fedora Atomic, and I don’t get along with Fedora Atomic.
As a general admittedly non-helpful suggestion, don’t get Nvidia hardware if you want to use Linux.
I tried Fedora but since they removed support of x11 and nvidia doesn’t get along with wayland, I’m out of luck.
pop os. most apps you can right-click to run on discrete graphics card, and they tried to make it gamer friendly.
worth a shot, anyhow.
Yeah that’s true, but dual booting is harder than with most and requires tinkering with the windows boot partition, which I’m not a big fan of.
I didn’t remember doing that, but I’ve been using Linux for ages and might have shrugged that off and forgotten.
It’s here: https://ostechnix.com/dual-boot-windows-and-pop-os/
In the “Configure SystemD Boot for Dual Boot” section, or maybe I misunderstand the guide?
Huh. Yeah. I just probably did what was necessary and didn’t think about it too much, but that’s just because I’ve been using Linux for ages.
looks like the easiest way is if you have them on two separate drives. I don’t, they share an efi partition… … but, Windows has also overwritten things on there before, and I had to rescue the Linux side. Not most peoples’ cup of tea.
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?
https://discord.gg/legionseries
IDK if it’s the one but it has #linux channel
I second disabling Nouveau via blacklist, and I’m unsure if there is similar software for Lenovo, but I use asusctl to force the use of the Nvidia card over the integrated Vega graphics. This could very well be an issue with graphics card switching, so it’s worth looking into.
As for distro recs, while most would probably recommended Linux Mint for beginners, I prefer to recommend Bazzite. It’s Fedora-based, but comes with Nvidia drivers and lots of gaming optimization baked-in.
I don’t have experience with dual GPU laptops but from what I’ve heard PopOS handles them really well. They also have an image with the nvidia drivers preinstalled which should make the setup process straightforward
Edit: I also found this github repo which documents some fixes for issues on that device specifically. Not sure how many of these have been patched upstream by now but it’s worth checking out.
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.
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.
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PopOS makes Nvidia life easy
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Give Linux Mint a spin, I seriously doubt there’s a friendlier distribution for newcomers from Windows.
But would it fix the core issues that OP is having?
Not directly, I’m just giving OP the answer they wanted:
The quick and dirty questions is: Which distro should I try next?
But wouldn’t mint have the same issues as Debian 12?
Mint has access to newer nvidia drivers than mint, and Cinnamon let’s you open programs with exclusively the Nvidia GPU instead of integrated graphics from the start menu.
Bazzite
Seconding this, Especially for the atomic stability and built in nvidia support
