I’m on a 5600 and would consider this… If it’s significantly cheaper then the 5800x3d.

But I’m expecting it to be a small discount.

My only issue with fairphone is that the phones simply haven’t been high end enough. But they’re slowly solving that, each new phone has been a lot better.

I do wonder when the AI bubble is gonna burst. Certainly it can’t be this popular forever, right?

Some of the problems you’re describing are not Linux issues specifically. Nvidia has worked a lot to make their hardware, specifically their proprietary hardware, the industry standard for productivity applications. That’s why Nvidia works better for those things. It’s like this on Windows too, that’s not a Linux problem.

Where AMD does work better is for…everything else on Linux. OP might not have run into issues like this because Nvidia has gotten a lot better recently. But new things often don’t work well or at all on Nvidia (wayland is a great example, it only recently got some critical fixes after months if not years), bugs can take far longer to squash if they’re to do with something on Nvidias side, etc.

I’m on a 5600, I would 100% upgrade to a 5700X3D if the price is good.

Just use a secondary SSD. You can get sata SSD’s for basically nothing, just get a small one and install your distro on that.

And as others said, I wouldn’t use Garuda first. Personally I’d just recommend fedora for your first go.

It kinda depends. I’d get the 4090 for the support in actual software (cuda, DLSS, RT, etc), but if it was just for general desktop use then an AMD card is gonna be better.

I haven’t actually rocked a nvidia card in a long time, but from what I understand it’s really not that bad these days.

Maybe try a smaller gaming device first and see how that makes you feel?

I LOVE my Miyoo Mini Plus for example. I’ve played through a shitload of games I never would have touched otherwise, simply because the pick up and play aspect is so well defined. It keeps save states of all your games instead of just one with the SD, so I can resume anything where I left off, in like 3 seconds from picking it up. Sleeping does the same thing.

The SD fills a similar niche to this but it’s obviously much more expensive and large. The Miyoo Mini Plus is like a tiny bit larger then a deck of cards and looks like a gameboy lol.

The sub r/SBCgaming has a lot of info on devices like this if that interests you.

If you could get an LCD model for incredibly cheap then I’d go with that. But at the current prices, as long as you’re not super strapped for cash, the OLED is likely going to be better enough to justify its price.

I mean, you’d want to lock frame rates even with VRR available because it can drastically lower power consumption, which in turn increases battery life and makes the thing run cooler and quieter.

Even if the deck had VRR (which it should not gonna argue there), you’d likely still want to run at a capped frame rate under pretty much every circumstance.

Keep your windows install around on another drive as a backup. Best thing you can do is grab a cheap SSD to put Linux on to experiment with.

I’ve been using Linux for a long time and while it’s gotten incredibly good for gaming, it still has some weak points and can give you issues. Sometimes you’re just gonna want to have Windows there if you wanna play something and not think about it. But hey in a few more years that probably won’t be the case.

As for what distro, please just use fedora. Garuda, nobura, manjaro, or any other distro that adds a bunch of stuff just isn’t worth fooling around with for your first distro. Fedora is up there with ubuntu for popularity and support, both being maintained by large organizations. They have their own media writer, they support everything you’ll ever need, it’s stable and up to date as well.

Man like, I’m just so put off of the whole GPU market and high end PC gaming in general lately. I’ve been wanting to upgrade my 5700XT for ages and there’s nothing worth while to me.

I have zero confidence that Nvidia is going to make these cards a “good” value. They’ll probably slot them between the current stuff just perfectly enough to where neither comes out as better for the money and you still hardly get any price/performance gains.