It's a Dell laptop with an Nvidia GPU. I tried Linux Mint but I'm having constant OS-breaking freezes after gaming for a while and it's happening on 2 different games so far (completely unresponsive, and it's with steam games so no custom tinkering in lutris/wine). Thinking I'll just try a fresh install but with PopOS when I have time.

Thanks for the summary, it all does make a bit more sense to me now but first time I had to spend half an hour just to find BG3 saves in Heroic due to the seemingly duplicates of folder structures all over the place lol

[–] rtxn@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Nvidia is unfortunately kind of a dick about Linux support. The open-source Nouveau driver is making great strides, but I don't think it'll be ready for general adoption for several years. The proprietary driver (the nvidia-dkms package) is far more usable, but there are always some issues.

If you want to focus on gaming, you should consider Nobara or Garuda Linux.

Garuda is based on Arch, and its main selling point is that whatever you need for gaming (Wine, Steam, DXVK, VKD3D) is either installed out of the box, or installed and configured in one click. Since Arch, and by extension, Garuda, is a rolling release, it gets very frequent updates that are always cutting edge, but it might require some maintenance at times.

Nobara is maintained by Glorious Eggroll, who also maintains custom Wine and Proton releases and has made massive contributions to Linux gaming. It's based on Fedora, which is a point-release distribution - it receives security updates continuously, and feature updates every few years, so it should require little maintenance.

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