I’m dual booting Pop_OS and Windows 11 for now while l try things out. I went with Pop_OS for the NVIDIA drivers, since I have a NVIDIA card. Installation went smoothly, but setup is where things started to get a little weird.
I have 2 monitors, a main 360hz monitor and a secondary 165hz monitor. I seem to be able to have them both working at the same time in Windows 11 without issue, but in Pop_OS, setting the refresh rate to 360hz on the first monitor causes both displays to stop working properly. The 360hz monitor will stop displaying picture all-together, and the 165hz monitor will start flickering wildly. Turning off the second monitor brings the 360hz’s image back, but then I’m down a monitor. Also, if I set the refresh rate to anything lower than 360hz, they’ll both work. I’d like to still be able to use it at the native refresh rate, but I can’t seem to find any other solutions or anyone else who seems to have had this same issue.
My second (slightly less annoying) issue is that I can’t seem to use HDR in games. Is this normal, or is there something I can do to bring back support?
Also, if Pop_OS isn’t the way to go, please let me know! I tried Nobara first, but immediately had issues with the displays locking up and flickering before I even got it installed.
Please do an update later on. I also want to try out Linux gaming. Gaming is the reason I keep going back to Windows.
If you haven’t already check ProtonDB for compatibility on your steam library! Anti cheat is usually a no go but some games will work. Non steam games you’ll have to check something like Lutris/Heroic for support.
I spent a few months last year running Nobara. I’m back on Windows unfortunately. There are a ton of games that ran just fine, but there’s also a lot of little issues. For example, in Grim Dawn I couldn’t type in chat, in Pathfinder WotR I simply couldn’t get mods to work, STALKER Anomaly simply wouldn’t load. Then there was the big issue of my mouse cursor dropping below full screen games. Still there, but not visible. The only fix I could use was to restart the computer.
It’s tantalizingly close to ready, and if you don’t care about modding it probably already is. For me it just didn’t work out, yet.
I hear you. So far I’ve tried:
I had a terrible experience with popOS, manjaro and Garuda. But it was back in 2020. Some of the issues you’ve mentioned and + a few more. I couldn’t use them as my daily driver. I’m using Nvidia. GPU had too many issues and lags. (I’m gonna dual boot to see how it goes).
After watching Chris Titus’s Linux tier video, I’m interested in trying:
I like the look of Fedora Plasma KDE (I wonder if you could get that look on the ones I have mentioned)
I’m not sure who this Chris Titus is, but I can’t believe there’s no mention of Bazzite in that infographic, which is surprising because it’s arguably the best distro for gaming right now (and a pretty decent newbie-friendly distro too). It’s also surprising there’s no mention of CachyOS, which is overall the best performing easy-to-install Linux distro right now (although since it’s based on Arch, I wouldn’t recommend it for newbies).
So if I were you, I wouldn’t put too much faith in their video when they missed out on these two (and several other cool distros such as Bluefin, SecureBlue, AntiX etc).
In saying that, nVidia on Linux sucks in general, so I second @ulkesk@beehaw.org’s suggestion and recommend getting an AMD instead - it’s so much more nicer and hassle-free, not having to deal with any proprietary driver bs, and having a smooth Wayland experience.
I have Nvidia, the actual experience of driver updating and installation on Nobara was seamless, it just has a setup tool that detects the card and downloads the drivers. The same was true for other peripherals, my razer keyboard and mouse were easy to setup, there was a tool for my XBOX controller.
The recommendation to get AMD is reasonable for new builds, but it’s also one of those little issues. I’m just not willing to give up my 4080 for a less capable piece of hardware. But again, I didn’t have any real issues, even VRR and dual monitors worked fine. Ray tracing was working in Steam games, but I couldn’t figure out how to get it running for my GOG games and whatnot. Like I said, it’s so close to being ready for daily driving, but not my personal use case.
Thanks for your reply. Bazzite looks amazing. BTW the tier chart is 9 months old. I will check out Bazzite.
I just tested out Kubuntu and it runs pretty well. I use arch for my main system.
I just posted an update here if you want to take a look! Going to keep at it tomorrow and see what else I can try from all these comments too.