I have heard good things about nobara. I don’t mind doing a little thinkering to have things work but I also don’t want to spend hours doing recharch on how to fix things.
Edit: thanks for giving input everyone. I will try Linux mint and if it does not go well will give nobara a go instead.
Edit part two I had to boot mint in compatibility mode because I got black screen for like 15+ minutes and then I couldn’t get it to see more than one monitor and 3 hours later gave up…Just put on nobara will load mint to my laptop and try to learn more because I want to but also tryna game :) you will hear more from me
If you mainly play Steam games, Mint will do the job just fine. Just install Steam and you’re good to go. No tinkering required.
Won’t I have to install Nvidia drivers? This is my big concern if I’m being frank (I have a Nvidia card)
Mint makes this very easy, it had a driver installer in settings last I used it.
I actually just found that on there page thanks :)
Yes, nvidia can be a bit of pain. Normally you a install proprietary drivers and it works, not always. AMD just works.
AMD “just works” unless you dare expect hardware encoding that you explicitly picked your card based on to work properly
Yeah, if you’re planning on doing anything fancy (e.g. RTX, FSR/DLSS, streaming w/ a specific encoding, etc), do some digging to check compatibility on Linux, you may need a newer kernel or something. If you just want a general experience (e.g. mostly playing/using apps on default settings), it’s less of a concern.
Well, that sounds better than be unable to login because kernel unattended update breaks nvidia drivers.
Depends, unless you wanted to record/stream in higher-than-toaster quality until a month ago
The lucky mostly of people don’t. I personally have any issues.
True, everything else runs great
Mint has a program that simplifies the process of installing Nvidia drivers. I think it’s just called “Driver Manager”.
You’ll have to do it for any modern game with medium to high requirements.
You need to change steam configuration to unable to enable compatibility for all games, or only Linux/proton approved will work. I agree mostly works out of the box, but eventually is good to check protondb website if for tinkering.
Mint is good, but Cinnamon development is lagging behind and starting to show it.
Last I tried to use it there was bug that caused compositing to impact game performance, it’s supposed to not do that and there’s a setting to disable compositing for games, but it’s been non-functional for years.
You can use Mint, but I’d ditch Cinnamon.