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.

  • Blaster M@lemmy.worldEnglish
    93·
    2 days ago

    1: You’re not yet ready for Arch and Arch derivatives (CachyOS, EndeavorOS, etc.)

    2: Fedora KDE

    3: Fedora KDE

    4: Fedora KDE

    Linux Mint is good, but it, like Ubuntu and Debian, are “vintage” linuxes that are very behind on software versions. Things are moving very fast right now with a lot of back end linux stuff changing rapidly to support more people and programs coming off Windows. Fedora is the best “middle ground” in that it’s not Arch bleeding edge, but it is also not Debian stable “vintage”.

    You do need to install RPM Fusion for Fedora to go from nvidia open source driver to nvidia proprietary driver, though.

    KDE is a fully featured desktop that will give you familiarity with Windows-like layouts. Some other desktops, like GNOME, tend to reinvent the wheel and have very different desktop workflows. You’ll have to boot the live discs / sticks and poke around to understand what I mean.

    To make a boot disc, use an 8GB+ usb stick and rufus - https://rufus.ie/

    • IratePirate@feddit.org
      2·
      2 days ago

      Things are moving very fast right now with a lot of back end linux stuff changing rapidly to support more people and programs coming off Windows.

      Please, indulge me. What exactly is it you’re talking about here?

      Imo, not having access to the most recent Thunderbird or LibreOffice version doesn’t matter at all to beginners, making Debian-based systems perfectly viable.

      Fedora KDE, on the other hand, may turn out to be an annoyance once they need to install proprietary drivers (as OP is due to their NVIDIA card).

    • HumbleExaggeration@feddit.org
      1·
      2 days ago

      This sounds like a good idea.

      I started my Linux journey with Mint. Installation was fine and everything worked, but gaming performance was terrible. I think because not properly supporting my 9700 gre.

      Then I installed nobara (fedora) and was really happy. Everything work smoothly. Also the gaming performance was at least as good as on windows. But the fact, that this distro is a small project of a single person I started too loog around for an alternative.

      This led to me installing CashyOS (Arch). The setup was a little more complicated and I needed to install more additional packages, than on nobara. It has been a few weeks now, everything is working without much problems, but still… I somehow do not feel at home, like when running nobara.

      I thought about switching back to nobara, but maybe fedora KDE is also an option…

  • pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip
    8·
    1 day ago

    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.

    • Etzello@midwest.social
      2·
      24 hours ago

      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.

      • pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip
        2·
        21 hours ago

        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.

        • Etzello@midwest.social
          2·
          12 hours ago

          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

  • Broken@lemmy.ml
    3·
    11 hours ago

    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.

  • testaccount372920@piefed.zipEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    There’s plenty of perfectly fine distributions out there. Mint is an easy choice, easy to get started with, big community that probably already has answered the questions you might have and otherwise you can ask them. Many more gaming focused people use Bazzite, not sure what it offers on top of a basic, well working environment.

    The Nvidea graphics card could cause issues since drivers tend to not be supported well. Again, you’re most likely to find help for the bigger distros such as Mint and Bazzite.

    Regardless of which distro you choose, just try it and see how it goes. Dual boot can be a nice starting point (but make sure you get the partitioning right before installing anything!).

  • HubertManne@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    I just don’t know with gaming as I have a steamdeck I do that with. I like zorin for out of box ease of use for beginners or someone who does not want to deal with their machine and just use it. I think gaming may be one use case for multibooting linux distros. I have heard bazzite for gaming and want to try it out. Theorectically you can just install steam onto any linux machine I think. Sorry I can’t be more help.

  • OR3X@lemmy.world
    398·
    2 days ago

    Stay away from the “bandwagon” distros for your first time. Bazzite, Pop_OS, Cachy, etc. There’s nothing wrong with them, but a lot more people use and have been using the more established distros such as Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, etc. So if you run into any weird edge case issues it’s much more likely that someone else has already been there and discovered solutions. Once you’re comfortable with Linux you can start exploring the more niche distros that are better tailored to you. Have fun!

    • tmjaea@lemmy.world
      191·
      2 days ago

      I’m not sure about this. I’m my experience, 90-99% of the solutions originally for Ubuntu worked for me in Pop.

      • poopsmith@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        11 hours ago

        Yeah, and since System76 supports Nvidia cards in their hardware, the drivers tend to work out of the box.

      • pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip
        2·
        1 day ago

        90-99% of the solutions originally for Ubuntu worked for me in Pop.

        Yes. When I’m running Debian, Mint, or various other Debian variants, the vast majority of “Ubuntu” recipes just work.

        Sometimes on Debian, itself, an Ubuntu recipe doesn’t work because some feature hasn’t made it into “Debian stable” yet. But usually it’s fine if the Ubuntu article is at least a year old.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2·
      11 hours ago

      I’m not sure I agree totally. In particular for CachyOS, since it’s Arch based, most solutions for Arch also apply. The Arch wiki is a great resource, and is often the place fixes are found even when not on Arch. Also, CachyOS (and others, like Garuda) are set up to run on modern gaming hardware. They are more likely to work for Nvidia and Intel hardware I believe. Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, etc are great if you’re using it for an old laptop or something, but I think gamers, in particular, are likely better served by these other distros.

    • hikaru755@lemmy.world
      31·
      20 hours ago

      if you run into any weird edge case issues it’s much more likely that someone else has already been there and discovered solutions

      While that is true, the amount of those weird edge cases that you’ll get varies wildly between distros. In my experience so far on a somewhat comparable rig to OP, Bazzite has been the only one that actually just worked out of the box and had not a single hickup, while any other distro I’ve tried (Pop, Fedora and Arch) all had several issues that required troubleshooting.

      So, I guess, for someone willing to actually understand Linux, learn, and troubleshoot issues themselves, your advice is the way to go, but for the relative who wants their system to just work and would call me anyway at any sign of trouble, I’m recommending Bazzite (or Aurora, I guess) all the way

  • JoeMontayna@lemmy.ml
    2·
    19 hours ago

    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.

    • tyrant@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      2 days ago

      The answer used to be mint. Now there are quite a few distros that are stable and “just work”. I’m using cachy as a daily driver at work and haven’t had any issues at all. And it’s arch based! So much for arch being unstable

      • IratePirate@feddit.org
        3·
        2 days ago

        The question is: how long have you been using it?

        Sooner or later, stuff will break on an Arch-based system, and a beginner will not necessarily be able to fix it. So I wouldn’t recommend any Arch-based system to beginners.

      • James R Kirk@startrek.websiteEnglish
        21·
        2 days ago

        Yeah I agree, Mint used to be my recommendation (and it’s a good choice for sure) but now I say Bazzite or Kinoite (for a newbie used to Windows) because KDE Plasma is better than Windows and the immutability adds another layer of stability.

        • tyrant@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          Yeah bazzite is pretty stinking good. I have it on a media/gaming computer in my living room. Great for beginners but slightly annoying for some things since it’s immutable. I’ve ran into a couple things that it wouldn’t let me do. But, that’s also why I chose it for my living room. My family can’t easily break it

  • actionjbone@sh.itjust.works
    6·
    2 days ago

    You’ve already gotten several good replies, and I’ll add a couple more details that might be related to your use case:

    Bazzite is a “gaming distro” with built-in Steam integrations. It’s great if all you do on the machine is game and do gaming-related things, like streaming. It’s what I use on my dedicated gaming PC, under my TV. Things mostly Just Work, and I’ve only had to mess with configuration files when setting up things like wake-on-USB and my custom Network shares.

    Gaming and streaming will work on basically any distro. And if you pick a distro based on Debian or Fedora, it should be stable and fairly easy to get used to.

    Don’t wipe out Windows yet. Install Linux on a separate partition, or even better a separate drive. That way, you can switch off between them until you’re fully used to Linux. Let yourself transition over a few months. That way, if you struggle to do something in Linux, you can switch back over to Windows and get it done.

    Some folks try to change all at once, then get frustrated if they hit a stumbling block. It’s safer to keep Windows as a backup, so you don’t feel trapped if something goes wrong.

    • TiredTiger@lemmy.ml
      3·
      2 days ago

      This is what I’ve been doing, and I’ve been on Bazzite for about 4-6 weeks now. I haven’t booted my Windows drive since the first week. It’s definitely an adjustment, but I’m finding my way around. Gaming on it has been pretty easy, it’s figuring out the Linux command line that is taking me more time. Knowledge of MS-DOS is really not transferable; all the commands are different. It’s kind of like learning a new language.

      But I also don’t depend on a bunch of proprietary software that won’t run on Linux, as I’d been moving away from that over the past 1-2 years. I think that’s made my transition a lot easier. My goal is to get to a point where the only proprietary stuff on my computer is video games.

  • Addv4@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 days ago

    Nvidia occasionally can be a pain, but that is mostly in laptops in my experience, desktop drivers are generally fine. Try whatever distro you want, might wanna start by burning some distros on flash drives and booting from them to see which one you like the most. Lazy recommendations are Mint, Fedora, Bazzite, and maybe endeavorOS. Also, the most you might have to do with regards to the Nvidia drivers is install them via terminal (which for a lot of people is literally copy/paste the command into a terminal and follow what it says, usually to enter your password and y/n do you want to install), but there are a few distros that have the option to install via GUI.

  • HuntressHimbo@lemmy.zip
    1·
    2 days ago

    Echo people saying go to a common starter distro instead of a more esoteric one. Another starter tip if you want to learn the ecosystem deeply is to find good sources of documentation.

    The man command is always useful, but for more general topics you can start looking with your distros help pages -> package documentation -> Alternate distro wiki. Essentially start with the documentation most relevant to your setup, which will often be your distros own guides. If your answer isn’t there you can check upstream with the packages themselves. Many have github/sourceforge pages with good info. If you still can’t find your answers several distros have documentation pages that are really really useful even when you’re on different distros. The Arch wiki is for me the defining feature of the distro, and almost any answer to a Linux question can be found between the Arch Wiki and the Gentoo Wiki if you read closely.