Hi all,
The quick and dirty questions is: Which distro should I try next?
I tried Debian X11 and Fedora with Wayland, but I did not have a great experience with them for my Lenovo Legion 5 Pro RTX3060. I installed proprietary drivers on both systems since people say that they’re better than Nouveau, but the framerate stutters even in simple browser game.
I use some software to slice 3d models for printing, and that one stuttered too. I tried various fixes but none of them worked, and I’d really like to switch to Linux from Microsoft for my daily driver.
What distro can I use to have a better experience? Any advice is welcome, but please make it as specific as possible and if you can, address why that distro would be better than Debian 12 and Fedora 42.
Thanks in advance!
Check the lenovo legión discord server, there is a linux channel and they can help you better than here probably
Interesting, thanks! Do you happen to have a link to it?
https://discord.gg/legionseries
IDK if it’s the one but it has #linux channel
This is the link, if you (op) are not familiar with discord it can be a bit overwhelming at first, but try to write in the chat your issue and for sure they can give you helpful feedback
I second disabling Nouveau via blacklist, and I’m unsure if there is similar software for Lenovo, but I use asusctl to force the use of the Nvidia card over the integrated Vega graphics. This could very well be an issue with graphics card switching, so it’s worth looking into.
As for distro recs, while most would probably recommended Linux Mint for beginners, I prefer to recommend Bazzite. It’s Fedora-based, but comes with Nvidia drivers and lots of gaming optimization baked-in.
Bazzite
Seconding this, Especially for the atomic stability and built in nvidia support
NVIDIA mostly does fine with Wayland now IME. Running KDE Wayland on a Legion Slim 5 with RTX 4060 myself for over a year now, with minimal problems after the NVIDIA 550+ drivers came out.
I did have definite problems, including on X11, with the 535 drivers that the Debian repos were still using at last check. Your best bet is probably to install the latest drivers straight from NVIDIA’s repos: https://docs.nvidia.com/datacenter/tesla/driver-installation-guide/index.html
That’s what I ended up doing on a Debian-based distro, and it pretty much fixed my issues. There are specific instructions linked there for different supported distros.
My daily driver now is Garuda, which is essentially just Arch with a GUI installer and some extremely handy extra user-friendly tools bolted on. It’s aimed at gaming, and so makes it extra easy to get the drivers set up and kept up to date. That is basically why I decided to give their installer a go in the first place after I got this laptop, to at least let it run hardware detection and see how it was configuring things, to tell where I might have been going wrong in my then-main distro. Then I liked the experience enough that I stuck around. It mostly just works.
Note: This would be from someone with experience on Arch. If you’re not cool with rolling releases, that may not be a good choice. Garuda does default to a BTRFS/Snapper setup that makes it easy to just boot into a previous snapshot if anything does break, which does come in handy occasionally.
But, as other commenters have already said? The distro itself doesn’t really matter. That’s mainly just down to personal taste. The important part here is getting the right drivers and configuration going on whatever you do prefer to use. Some distros just make this easier than others
Like others suggested here, the problem is probably nouveau and you might want to try a gaming-oriented distro which usually configure these things correctly out-of-the-box. My favourite is Nobara and Fedora (which didn’t work for you but works for me because I have different hardware). People suggest Bazzite, but I cannot recommend it because it’s based on Fedora Atomic, and I don’t get along with Fedora Atomic.
As a general admittedly non-helpful suggestion, don’t get Nvidia hardware if you want to use Linux.
I tried Fedora but since they removed support of x11 and nvidia doesn’t get along with wayland, I’m out of luck.
pop os. most apps you can right-click to run on discrete graphics card, and they tried to make it gamer friendly.
worth a shot, anyhow.
Yeah that’s true, but dual booting is harder than with most and requires tinkering with the windows boot partition, which I’m not a big fan of.
I didn’t remember doing that, but I’ve been using Linux for ages and might have shrugged that off and forgotten.
It’s here: https://ostechnix.com/dual-boot-windows-and-pop-os/
In the “Configure SystemD Boot for Dual Boot” section, or maybe I misunderstand the guide?
Huh. Yeah. I just probably did what was necessary and didn’t think about it too much, but that’s just because I’ve been using Linux for ages.
looks like the easiest way is if you have them on two separate drives. I don’t, they share an efi partition… … but, Windows has also overwritten things on there before, and I had to rescue the Linux side. Not most peoples’ cup of tea.
It’s not your fault because with nvidia gpu you have to add env variables to tell your pc that use nvidia prime, no matter what distro you use you have to configure env varibales, although I’ll suggest you openSUSE-Tumbleweed and I was going to suggest you Fedora but you had problems so it’s ok.
Try Ubuntu, it has a user friendly GUI for installing Nvidia and other 3 parts drivers.
I have non pro version and I disabled the iGPU in BIOS it worked on ubuntu but battery was nonexistent.
Recently I switched on the iGPU. Now I tried various distros and Arch and Bazzite worked out of the box.
This could be an issue where the AMD GPU is only being used. I, like some of the others would suggest Linux Mint.
My choice is Arch Linux purely because it’s bleeding edge
I’ve no idea if Arch actually has newer drivers than Debian / Fedora, but if they are you’ll (usually) get better support from the developers of whatever application / package - or in your case - drivers that you’re facing.
It’s more involved than “just” installing Debian, etc… but reading through the Arch Linux wiki as you install will (should) ensure you’ve got the correct drivers setup and you’ll know why they’re working.
So… it’ll be more effort, but you might get “better” results.
I’ve no idea if Arch actually has newer drivers than Debian / Fedora
Kinda, since Arch has nvidia’s own drivers in their extra repo, whereas in Fedora you’ll have to do some stuff to get them.
Okay, I had the same problem with a 3060 laptop. The easy answer is : your next distro should be Nobara.
These errors happen because your computer does not use your Nvidia GPU but the AMD one. There is no hardware acceleration.
In Nobara, everything comes preinstalled and preconfigured. I didn’t have those problems anymore.
(If you fancy masochism, you can also go the Arch or NixOS way)
Thanks! I’m downloading nobara now, any tips to get it to work as expected?
None ! That’s the greatest thing. Take the time to read the welcome message (you know that window that come when you first boot any distro) and follow any instruction. It should work out of the box.
Only shame is that they don’t recommend dual hooting with windows, which is a requirement for me
op is a secret owl
Distros are a red herring. I used debian 12 (first gnome, then xfce) for more than a year with no problems, and the current version of Bazzite is also problem-free for me when it comes to nvidia prime (apart from a KDE-specific memory leak). Basically, this should be easily fixable without a fresh install.
I don’t know what distro you’re on atm, but set up prime-run and try running programs with that. I also recommend going onto the uefi and disabling secure boot. You can get it to work with proprietary nvidia drivers, but it’s a bit of a process and unless you really need it you might as well leave it off for now.
Did you make sure that Nouveau was not loading? If both drivers are on the system, Nouveau usually ends up taking precedence unless it’s been blacklisted. Also, if this is a laptop type with a hybrid graphics setup, you may need additional software to manage the handoff between GPUs (optimus, bumblebee, etc.)
I’ve done some more digging and indeed, the AMD integrated GPU is being used. Optimus seems like a good option, but then apparently I’d have to use x11 as the desktop renderer because Wayland doesn’t play nice with nvidia.
As far as I can see, x11 will be deprecated not too long from now?
Mark my words, X11 will still be around as an option 10 years from now.
Linux Mint, probably the most popular distro, doesn’t even support Wayland in its default configuration, yet.OP, as someone who has a very similarly specced laptop:
Install Linux Mint, do a one click install of the Nvidia driver with the mint GUI driver installer, and then open the application that’s stuttering from your start menu by right clicking on it, and select ‘run with discrete GPU’, which will force it to use your Nvidia card.
Wayland’s nvidia support is improving over time, but although it’s becoming less popular, X11 isn’t likely to be completely deprecated anytime soon—I’d expect any mainstream distro to still at least have it as an option a couple of years from now, to handle corner cases Wayland still doesn’t support.
The last X11 stable version bump on my distro was about a month ago, to 21.1.16, so it isn’t like it’s abandonware or anything.
Oh, that’s good to know. So I can just install x11 on my Fedora no problem whatsoever?
Provided Fedora has the appropriate packages (and I expect they do), I can’t see why not. But see if there’s any distro-specific documentation on switching first.
I have a desktop which has / had a similar problem.
Originally I built it with a g-series Ryzen which has integrated Radeon Vega graphics. Upgraded to a 3060 and wanted to run Linux for gaming instead of windows.
I couldn’t get a distro to reliably use my graphics card without the issues you describe. Stuttering, crashing, generally unusable.
Garuda was the answer (to be fair I’d try Bazzite too but I just didn’t get there as Garuda worked). In fact, it worked out of the box for me and I enjoyed it so much I made it my work OS.
I like the GUI utilities they’ve made for front-ending a bunch of Arch CLI utilities and I’ve been saved by BTRFS snapshots more than once.
try installing btop and having a look at the gpu utilisation when you’re running stuff
