Hey all, I’m sure things of this nature have been asked to death here, and I have read the FAQ, but I have been combing through numerous reddit threads, youtube videos and github pages in the last 16 hours and I’ve pretty much been on the struggle bus the whole time.
I woke up at 8 A.M today and resolved myself to get off windows during my long weekend. (My windows install was already struggling, taking forever to boot into and the OS itself was showing signs of slowness, so I planned to reinstall anyways no matter what)
I have used Linux before but I am far, far from a power user. I’ve seen many distro’s recommended for gaming in threads spanning from 7 Months - 3 years old, and at this point I feel like I’ve tried most of them.
As of now, I’ve tried Pop OS, Nobaru, Arch and every time I run into some issues. (Pop OS was the closest I go to functional, I had Mount and Blade running, if badly) I’m sad because Nobaru seemed really promising, but it looks like my GPU is a bit out of date to what it’s intended for. (It kept repeatedly asking me to install codecs and drivers ad infinitum due to errors) If it matters, I’m using a Nvidia Geforce Rtx 2070 Super. Which distros at the present are considered the most friction-less for non-savvy users as far as gaming goes and support my GPU?
Arch just was throwing errors of which I forget their contents, but it magically worked this time after I re-flashed my USB and reinstalled so literally as I was typing this I managed to boot into it. I’m going to probably go along with those youtube tutorials now and see how I fair, but I’d definitely appreciate any guidance or suggestions anyone might have regarding this. (I was even just reading an old post discouraging using the archinstall command for install because it was buggy, but I’m not sure how true that hold now) This is pretty much going to be my weekend and I’m definitely going to try as hard as I an to get -something- remotely functional, I guess I just want to know what my best bet is statstically.
Thanks in advance.
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Hello, so you probably read it before but it’s worth repeating, any mainstream distro can be used for gaming. Gaming distros usually just have a few settings already done for you compared to their base but that’s about it, granted Nobara seems to do more than most.
Now for the issues you had it probably came to some post install configuration missed or maybe Nvidia drivers with Wayland being the usual pain.
The RTX 2070 Super isn’t that old and should work fine.
Check the main games you have and their compatibility in protondb, example for Mount and Blade II: https://www.protondb.com/app/261550
If you don’t feel like tinkering and don’t see a game you WANT to play there maybe it’s not there yet for you.
Regarding a distro recommendation Mint is often mentioned for new users and they seems to have articles dedicated to Nvidia: https://itsfoss.com/nvidia-linux-mint/
I do tend to prefer mainlines distro instead of derivatives and two could match what you are looking for
Both are very polished and well supported, and should work perfectly fine with Nvidia
Whatever distro you choose take your time and read the documentation, the post install and how you maintain your system is what will break it or not, be it a Debian or a Gentoo ;)
https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Tumbleweed
https://github.com/devangshekhawat/Fedora-39-Post-Install-Guide
Also another reason to pick a mainline distro, you will find support more easily.
I ran with Linux Mint Mate for years with the Ubuntu test PPA for Drivers and a Nvidia GPU, also do a MemTest on your system for RAM issues. and you can install Kernel 6.2 as well with it.