I’m planning on putting linux on a gaming laptop (an Asus TUF f15 from 2021), and I’m having a hard time deciding which distro to go with. I’m particularly interested in Nobara and Garuda, but any recommendations or advice are welcome.
I’d consider myself a novice at *nix, so I’m looking for something that’ll just work with a minimum of troubleshooting. From what I’ve read the biggest barrier to “just working” is probably going to be the GPU(s); for battery life reasons I need to be able to use the Nvidia card for games and the integrated GPU for less intensive tasks. If anyone could tell me about their experience with TUFs or getting Nvidia Optimus to work on linux I’d appreciate it.
Wayland with KDE is fine these days on Nvidia. On more exotic setups it might still cause some problems though.
It works better with newer cards. I am currently using Wayland on my 3090 and it works about 75% of the way I want it to. Occasionally the taskbar and/or system clock will freeze, which is fixed by a relog. Also the translucency in themes does not render properly, but that’s a small price to pay for full refresh rates across varied monitors.
I have a laptop with a 1650 and because it’s kind of a weird half-niche card, Wayland does not work well with it forcing me to stick with X.
Panel freeze is a known KDE bug on non-Intel GPUs. It’s fixed in Plasma 6, avoid it on Plasma 5 by disabling window previews for the panel.