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.
I recommend Bazzite, been daily driving it on my Steam Deck and it’s been great. It’s not that far off from being Nobara’s immutable cousin so you get a pretty up to date Fedora base with user friendly but powerful gaming specific tweaks and can pick (and switch between at any time) either Gnome or KDE Plasma variants.
Due to its immutable nature, you get pretty much risk free updates and if something does break, rolling back is as easy as picking a different item at boot time. It keeps everything updated with minimal interaction, OS updates happen in the background and apply the next time you reboot, user apps just keep themselves updated. Oh and it has a NVIDIA iso with the drivers baked in so you don’t need to do anything special to enable them.
The one question mark is Optimus support, not sure if it’s actually in but I’d guess it works since it’s got some laptop specific builds. Might be worth a try.
Edit: I just remembered they do have Asus specific builds as well