I have an older i7 circa 2009, 16 gigs ram, and a gtx1060 with an ssd for os. I’m thinking either Pop!_Os or Nobara? Idea’s, what do yall think?
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I’m more inclined to say Pop but that’s only because it’s more established but either should be fine.
I settled on Pop, the other distro was giving me wifi problems and I didn’t feel like going up and down stairs. Pop works great out the box.
Nobara has been an absolute pleasure and “works out of the box” experience. Mainly due to having things preinstalled or prompting for installation of gaming dependencies and software up front.
My “get into Linux gaming” distro was Pop. Solid distro tho and having isos depending on your hardware is super helpful and cuts down on a lot of issues you may encounter with other distros. You can’t go wrong either way. If you are looking for a “do it for me/minimal tinkering and installing” go for Nobara. If you are looking to “possibly tinker/install a bit more up front” go for Pop.
Edit: Forgot to mention my specs are somewhat the same as your. i5 with 16gbs of RAM, 1080ti and 1tb ssd. Both Pop and Nobara run smoothly with heavy games like Cyberpunk as an example.
Ok I just switched to Nobara. It’s great.
It is indeed. Just remember normal sysadmin/security stuff still applies just like any other OS/distro. For example, update regularly, backups, test your backups every now and then, etc.
Can you recommend a good site for learning the ropes? It’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff with just a web search.
Honestly you learn most by doing it yourself. Where to start depends on how versed you are with system administration, Linux, self hosting, etc. If you are an absolute beginner then start with Linux sysadmin videos (for example, what are the top most important things to do to a new Linux server, how to secure a Linux servers, etc). Once you have a list of “you should do x” then dive deeper into each topic to make sure you understand why and how.
Just don’t run random commands that you don’t understand what it does. You said you were learning right? Then take that command and learn why and what you are running.
I can help further if you have specific topics you need help with. This community is also amazing but some times a search on the community yields exactly or close to what you are looking for so leverage that too!
I have been using Pop-os for a while now. I want to try and switch to arch but i just cant figure it out lol. I really like the feel of pop os tho. I dont use a dock, only the top bar and tiling function and it works great out of the box without having to install tiling window managers and stuff.
Also i’m on a laptop and the battery power manager of pop os works great.
Anyways, pop os has been great for me :D
OK so now I’m thinking Garuda vs Nobara :🤔. How do I do a poll lol. Thanks for the feedback btw’s.
Whhhhhhy!!! I finally installed Nobara, why did everything go fine had wifi. After updating and restart, wifi doesn’t work. I tried looking around can’t find anything. I have a usb netgear wifi adapter. It’s so annoying because it works before updating. I tried 3x, I’m still new to linux.
Sorry that’s been a pain! Does it connect to your router but can’t access websites or completely can’t connect?
Connections has a red X over it. Works in live, but not after install. Popos worked np.
Why do you want to switch if everything is working out for you with pop-os?
Well I’m not atm because I really like the setup at the moment, but I was hoping it was a known quick fix just in case I feel like hopping on something else for whatever future reason. That being said I am pretty happy with my pop experience.
I guess it depends on what you want.
I’d go with something with a lot of support like Ubuntu if you’re new to Linux.
I’m rocking a similar setup and running arch (btw) with kde, 0 issues so far. It feels snappy and I can even game on it.
Personally, I feel like any distro works for gaming these days, especially since you have an Nvidia card and don’t need to stay super up to date with kernel and Mesa. My advice is to go with whatever distro suits your daily needs, not just gaming. As long as it isn’t some super stable enterprise-centric distro like RHEL or Debian stable, you’ll be fine.
especially since you have an Nvidia card
Can you elaborate on why Nvidia is especially good? I’ve mostly seen AMD being recommended before (though both generally work fine).
No, I was just saying that with Nvidia, the need for the latest Mesa and kernel is lessened somewhat since you’ll most likely be using the proprietary drivers instead. With AMD, its pretty important to be on the latest Mesa and latest kernel, especially for newer AMD GPUs. On Ubuntu, this usually means adding a bunch of additional PPAs, whereas on other distros like Fedora and Arch, those driver updates just come through the regular system updates.
On the subject of AMD vs Nvidia in general, it really depends on your usecase. I feel like a lot of Linux users on Reddit and the Fediverse are really biased towards AMD while being blind to the cons of owning an AMD card. It basically boils down to:
AMD Pros
- Better performance / dollar (for rasterized graphics only)
- Wayland
- FOSS drivers that work out of the box
- Better support for hardware video acceleration in browsers.
Nvidia Pros
- Much better raytracing performance
- DLSS
- CUDA / Optix
- Better video decoder and encoders (when they’re supported by the software you use at least)
- Better support for compute and AI workloads
- Better day one support for new hardware and usually adopts Vulkan extensions faster
Corporate loyalty is stupid and should be left on Reddit. Make your own decision based on your personal needs. Anecdotally, I own both AMD (Vega 7 and Radeon 680M) and Nvidia (RTX 3090) hardware. AMD tends to be less stable in my experience, but I know others have experienced the opposite.
