I use Fedora 37 workstation with the Nvidia proprietary drivers from RPM Fusion. Relatively painless install, with the option to sign the kernel module if you want to keep secure boot on. Only downside is the Nvidia drivers still don’t work great with Wayland, so I normally login with Gnome on X for gaming.

I’ve just switched from a GTX 1080 to a Radeon RX 6650 because of problems I was having with the Nvidia binary drivers.

Games performed just fine, but my desktop performance would slow down dramatically if I had a lot of things running at the same time, especially YouTube videos. This issue seems completely resolved now that I’m using an AMD card.

However, based on what I’m reading online it seems that a lot of people are using the Nvidia binary drivers without any major issues. So maybe my experience isn’t very representative either.

nvidia’s usually a pain in the ass when it comes to linux. that being said, it isn’t too bad. just don’t expect good wayland support. stick to x org and you’re probably fine once you get the nvidia drivers installed and signed.

as far as distro goes, i recommend fedora. overall really solid choice, had 0 issues with it, gaming included.

I’d highly recommend checking out Nobara, it’s based on Fedora but optimized for gaming. In addition to supporting nVidia out of the box, it has a ton of tweaks and gaming related apps pre-installed, such as Steam and Lutris, which is a huge time saver. Should be the most out-of-the-box gamer friendly distro, outside of SteamOS I reckon.

if you use the proprietary drivers you’ll be fine, probably not even noticable

if you go with a Radeon card or try using open source drivers then go with god

Basically it just works except if you use a bleeding edge distro like Arch where the newest Linux kernels are sometimes still incompatible with the binary only Nvidia driver. Overall the experience is a bit better with an AMD GPU and the open-source drivers though.

If you use a distro that includes Nvidia drivers by default (like Ubuntu or Pop!OS or VanillaOS) it is pretty much a no brainer nowadays. For gaming I’ve been using Ubuntu with an Nvidia card for the past 3 years, and did not encounter any problem related to the drivers.

I’ve been gaming on Linux with nvidia gpus for over a decade, it is fine… There is a lot of negativity about nvidia because the drivers are not open. But they work, and I have not personally had any issues.

I had laptop with descrete Nvidia graphics card and had no trouble with most of the distros i tried. Theh either offer inbuilt driver app, which let’s you choose which driver to use or you google it and follow an uncomplicated guide.

That being said, i always recommend dual booting at first, something might go wrong with your first installation or you just forgot that you had something important on windows. If it’s a desktop, i recommend getting and extra ssd. Which you will use for linux (for now). Later it’s always convenient to have extra storage. They are not too expensive anymore. You can have your linux playground, where you can test distros and see how they actually work on your machine and you can revert to windows in the meantime.

I’ve been using Linux Mint with an Nvidia GPU for a few months now. I have run into a few issues where it hasn’t wanted to behave itself, buf nothing major or unsolvable.

Great recommendations here already, just chiming in to say that it works great with no issues at all.

It’s not great I can’t even use nvenc and have to use software encoding for OBS…

I mean everything else works, so I guess this is a high bar? ?

I’ve been gaming on Nvidia cards since I switched over 3 years ago and only had a few issues.

On initial install, the opensource nvidia drivers wouldn’t work - I had to go into the terminal and select the proprietary ones. That’s pretty much it, really. Other than that, I’ve had about the same amount of issues with AMD(integrated graphics) and Nvidia.

On the plus side, Nvidia has a nice little control panel. It’s basic, doesn’t have all that GeForce Experience stuff, plus there are command line utilities like nvidia-smi(basic info) and nvtop(temp, clock, usage, memory stats). AMD doesn’t have a control panel, that I’m aware of.

As far as distro, I’d say just chose the one you’re most comfortable with. I don’t think there are any huge differences between them concerning gaming performance.

You’ll want to use the proprietary Nvidia drivers if you want any sort of performance. It can be a pain to get started sometimes, but when you get them working, they work and performance is good.

Personally I’m annoyed because any time I change my kernel version, I have to reinstall the Nvidia drivers. It’s quite possible that this is not an issue if you don’t use an extremely weirdly configured install of Gentoo like I currently do.

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