I’m planning on putting linux on a gaming laptop (an Asus TUF f15 from 2021), and I’m having a hard time deciding which distro to go with. I’m particularly interested in Nobara and Garuda, but any recommendations or advice are welcome.
I’d consider myself a novice at *nix, so I’m looking for something that’ll just work with a minimum of troubleshooting. From what I’ve read the biggest barrier to “just working” is probably going to be the GPU(s); for battery life reasons I need to be able to use the Nvidia card for games and the integrated GPU for less intensive tasks. If anyone could tell me about their experience with TUFs or getting Nvidia Optimus to work on linux I’d appreciate it.
Ubuntu is a bit of a between good and meh distro nowadays : It is well maintained and up to date enough, with the gnome desktop. So good enough.
However they push their own “proprietary” (at least for the servers), packaging format : snap. Currently it’s OK, but also a security nightmare.
Anyone can put software on there, it is not checked for malware, and there is very little official support from devs, so often it’s community packages, which obviously aren’t to be always trusted.
There are a bit similar issues with flatpak. But at least it’s open source. Tho not sure on how the official flatpak repo is checked for malware, if it even is.
For native packages (apt-get for Ubuntu as example) (not in their snap or flatpak containers), it is often maintained by trusted people in the community or companies. So the software is checked and more trustworthy.
Linux mint and pop os are based on Ubuntu, and so also use apt. But they don’t force snap packages if you like to stay on something you experimented with.
Other distros like fedora (or nobara) can use other packaging formats. Dnf for them. It works about the same, however as they don’t use the same packaging, they are not directly compatible with .deb files (often proposed by companies which software wasn’t put in a repo).
However, the flatpak community is also often here to get all these things working smoother. So for example discord isn’t available natively on fedora, but it is available from in flatpak.