My current rig is featuring an I7 10th gen and a nvidia 4070ti. Is there a distro that you recommend me to use as a linux beginner that is also good for gaming and streaming, that will work with my pc parts? Because I heard that intel and nvidia are famous for causing issues on Linux.
Just use Fedora.
Fedora Atomic! Kinoite rocks
I went straight to uBlue Aurora and I’m very happy with this distro.
Haven’t had a problem on Bazzite. Intel i9 and nvidia 3060.
First pick a desktop environment, currently KDE, Gnome and Cinnamon are the best.
- Gnome: Opinionated design like apple
- KDE: tons of options.
- Cinnamon: A bit fewer options than KDE but still a lot.
All of them are very robust and have a massive user base.
Then pick a base to operate on. Fedora, Ubuntu and Mint are all good options.
- Fedora and Ubuntu are good for newer hardware and 99% of the time just works.
- Mint just works all the except for newer hardware.
Nvidia GPUs are not a big issue but you have to install the proprietary driver yourself for best performance and fewest bugs.
My pick for you is something your friend uses if you have a friend on Linux otherwise Fedora KDE or Kubuntu.
My first distro was Mint. It’s great for beginner Linux users, and it’s pretty stable. It also avoids the Snap problem Ubuntu forces upon their users.
If you’re looking for a more bleeding edge solution, I recommend Garuda Linux. It’s Arch-based, and it has a bunch of game-related stuff already installed. It might be a tad less stable due to the Arch underbelly, but I personally like the package system (pacman) a lot more than apt. Also, you get the unmatched power of the Arch wiki when you’re in trouble.
I have similar specs and use pop!_os with no problems. I’ve found it to be great for gaming.
Any and all advice anyone gives you is going to be heavily weighted by their personal experiences, which is not bad, but also may not be your experience. Truly the best thing to do, if you are willing, is to try a bunch.
Download several different distributions. Get as many USB sticks as you reasonably can. Flash a different distro to each drive. Boot to them one at a time, and try them out. See what you like about one versus another. Hopefully you find one that just “clicks” for you, and then you actually install it to the computer. From there, if everything works, great - enjoy your computer. However, if you immediately run into problems, just go install your number 2 favorite and see if those problems exist there. There’s a reasonable chance they won’t.
Good places to start:
- Mint
- Debian
- PopOS
- Fedora (check out their “spins”, there are a lot of flavors of Fedora)
- Bazzite
- OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
- Cachy
- Endeavor
- Garuda
(There is a thing called Ventoy which kinda lets you use several distros from one usb stick, but I’ve also seen several distro’s instructions warn against using it so maybe it isn’t the best choice for a new convert). Also, obligatory stay away from Manjaro. It isn’t worth it as a new convert…
This should be the answer to all these questions!
Check https://bazzite.gg/
My oldish Nvidia 4xxx GPU worked immediately and automatically on Linux Mint.
Your mileage may vary.
Edit: To be clear, I didn’t do any command line, or even change a setting. Mint just automatically detected my Nvidia GPU and got it working during the install while I looked at pretty pictures and new user tips.
(Disclaimer: Folks here have warned me this may have been some combination of luck and my Nvidia GPU being a few years old.)
When my Mint install finished, I searched for “Steam” in the Mint software center and clicked “Install”.
A few minutes later I was playing a game from my Steam library without any issues, without any config changes, and without any command line use.
Edit 2: On Linux, there’s a little Penguin icon in the Steam library filters. Click that, and it’ll only show your games that Valve is pretty confident will run without any issue.
It took me a few clicks to realize it did anything, at all. Very few of my games were filtered out. None of my games that were filtered out happened to fit in the first page of search results.
So at first it looked like penguin filter button did nothing.
+1 for LM, no issues so far with my gaming laptop
That’s pretty awesome, I bought an old used laptop, not a gaming laptop to practice and I’m new in the Cybersecurity field so I’m a little behind layman stage of using Linux. I installed Ubuntu on that laptop and it’s been a pleasure to use. I was gonna partition my gaming PC’s main drive and try Linux Mint on it. Even if my Nvidia card might not work out of the box, there’s a whole open source community who make compatible drivers independently. I love the open source community. Bunch of people who do what they love without demanding anything for it, just wow.
I was gonna partition my gaming PC’s main drive and try Linux Mint on it.
Nice!
If you can afford it, I lately recommend getting a separate harddrive, and physically taking the Windows drive out, and putting a blank drive in, to run Linux on.
Windows has never liked to share, and has gotten worse (more aggressive preventing other operating systems from booting) with various integrations into BIOS for secure boot.
Also, either way, be sure to back everything up while Windows is still installed. It is much easier to lose data today, due to secure boot and full disk encryption being the default.
(Putting the Windows drive back in and resetting any BIOS settings should be enough, but it is possible that Windows will decide it wants the full disk encryption (FDE) password. I believe I have found my FDE password on the web through Microsoft account, but there’s just more that can go wrong, today. So I prefer to just have my files backed up so I can relax.)
(And be aware that it may not be possible to backup files directly from a removed Windows drive, if full disk encryption was enabled. There’s probably a utility for it, as long as you have the FDE password. But again, it’s much less effort to just make backups before pulling the Windows drive out.)
I’ve had the best experience booting to a fresh blank harddrive and installing Linux Mint on it, and throwing the Windows drive into a drawer until I find I want the extra drive space more than I want a retreat path to Windows.
I highly appreciate your advice on this. I was reading up on it earlier and what I found was being alarmist about it and I remember from many years ago that it wasn’t supposed to be this tedious but you seem to verify that it kinda is tedious these days. Thanks
any modern distro should work so if you want þe go to beginner distro try mint!
There’s a lot of info in these comments and a ton of it is good.
I will say that the best advice is to boot from a USB and try out a system for a bit. You can easily swap around that way without a commitment.
I will also say that my opinion is to start with Mint. It’s similar enough to windows in layout/workflow to feel familiar and is “boring” in a stable, easy to use way.
Use it and learn Linux. I say learn, because it doesn’t matter what the OS looks like as much as how it works, and Linux (any flavor) works differently than windows. Learn those idiosyncrasies and then of you decide you want to try something else then you’re up to speed to move on and judge a different system with a baseline.
I started with a Steam Deck. Now I’m running PopOS on my Framework 13 and Bazzite on a home theatre PC. I’ve had far fewer issues with them than any flavor of Windows.
I can’t go back. I won’t.
From my experience running a setup with a RTX 3080, I recommend CachyOS. It has all the latest Nvidia drivers out of the box and you can download additional gaming packages in the “Hello” window. You can try other OSs but I found this one to be the most capable and versatile for me. As long as you make backups regularly and customize your experience with caution you’ll have a good time.
Debian, it’s 30+ years old for a reason.
For us dummies that are just getting started, and most of us are only doing it now because gaming has kept us on Windows, it would be nice if there were a Linux distribution that was singlularly focused on gaming.
bazzite
The desktop environment you choose is really down to what you prefer:
Like trackpads? Gnome
Like the Windows desktop (and/or like customization)? KDE
Like windows XP flat UI or brutally simple UI? Cinnamon/XFCE
Want to dive into the unknown cutting edge? Cosmic
