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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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The horror stories often come from years ago, when Linux wasn't as under-friendly as it is now. You shouldn't have any problems with this.
And if Mint does give you problems (which I doubt), consider trying a plug-and-play gaming distro like bazzite. It supports nvidia GPUs right away.
Thing is, I want to use my PC for more than just gaming, so I figured a gaming-focused distro might get in the way when I want to do non-gaming stuff.
At their heart, most distros are approximately "made of the same stuff". There's differences in package management in the background (e.g. how the "software centre" works), but essentially the difference between a "gaming distro", "normal distro" and "creative distro" is just what programs are installed by default, and how a few things are set up by default.
Nothing stops me playing games on Mint (and historically, Ubuntu and Ubuntu Studio) - and likewise, nothing will stop you installing office programs, audio/video/graphics programs etc on something presented as a gaming distro.
No you can pretty much do everything the same. The biggest difference is the distro it's based on, bazzite is based on fedora, you use "sudo rpm-ostree install" to install packages. Fedora has a system where it layers packages onto an ostree so if you have an issue you can boot from an old one.
Rpm is only needed for system packages, most packages can just be installed via a flatpack in the package store, which is all free and open source software.
Bazzite is a great starting point. It is pretty much turn key, while having the best performance and proprietary drivers. It already has everything installed to get emulating windows apps working easily out of the box. Wine, proton, steam, the proprietary drivers. These are all things you are going to want probably and this will save you a headache and several days of trying to get the system setup.
Make sure you disable UEFI and choose legacy boot in your bios if it's available and also disable the TPM in the bios if available. It will work with those enabled, but it's buggier and the TPM causes performance issues. Linux doesn't need these and they are artificially imposed by Microsoft and the big corporate OSes, but they suck compared to the original simple standards for bootstrapping. I'm not 100% sure how well this works on everything. It's possible some newer cards might require UEFI boot, but you can just turn it back on before you install.
I recommend KDE as the desktop environment, especially if you are used to windows. It will feel the most natural and familiar to you. I also recommend asking chatGPT to help you with basic tasks like installing system level software. Make sure you specify that you are using bazzite. Once you learn to use Linux its so much better than Windows. The performance is much better in nearly every regard. You can do anything you want with Linux, where windows is extremely locked down nowadays. It also prolongs the life of your hardware, especially drives, since windows spyware isn't constantly scanning your files and stuff. With proton you will likely see a 5-15% performance jump over gaming on windows natively. The downside is that many popular games won't work in multiplayer because of the anti heat, and also some trash software like Photoshop won't work, but the vast majority of windows apps will work just fine, even multiplayer. The developers have to go out of their way to make multiplayer games not work on Linux, so it's pretty rare, even if many of the bigger studios do it. You can dual boot windows for this if you really want to, but windows will constantly try to screw up your boot and stuff so you have to be careful. I would say just not support those companies which go out of their way to not support Linux. They are anticompetitive and anti consumer.
The learning curve for Linux isn't quite a cliff now, it's still steep, but with bazzite it's much easier then it ever has been. It mostly just works from a simple gui install, and there isn't really anything you need outside of this base install. Perhaps you want to install, protonup-qt so you can install proton GE, which has better support for some games that rely heavily on .net code, like space engineers.
That depends on what that other stuff is. Bazzite is a desktop OS first, gaming second. But it us atomic, so installing apps that aren't available as a flatpak is somewhat more complicated.
Mint is a great start though, I seriously doubt that you will have problems. Just don't be afraid to experiment.
I have a RTX 3060 and just installed the proprietary driver on Arch with pacman and that was it.
The issues with Nvidia GPU's has been blown up way to much in the last few years in my opinion.
The potential problems you "might" face are:
For most major distros now a days you either select the Nvidia option when installing (like Manjaro) or install the drivers afterwards (Ubuntu based) and be off to the races.
Set up and use Timeshift, make a backup before installing updates and you can roll back if there is an issue.
It will work. Under Linux mint for example you can use the firmware installer to install the correct Nvidia driver.
Too bad nvidia drivers are proprietary, so it's not part the default kernel drivers. That is why I like AMD so much more, it has open sourcer drivers. Fk nvidia 😁
Then playing games you will of course need wine or Proton in case of windows games.
For native Linux games it's the best thing. Ideally have a game that supports vulkan for the best performance. Or opengl.
It's not, today it works flawlessly, every distro has a simple way to install the proprietary drivers. It's just stories from people repeating a very old song that has no anchor in today's reality.
I recently installed Mint on my PC with my 4090, it works fine, just use the driver manager to install the latest proprietary driver for your gpu and reboot :)
Got Pop OS with Nvidia's driver packages and it worked like a charm. And of course updating can be done through the package manager. No problems whatsoever, at least for me.
On Nixos haven’t had any issues. I did have issues getting the dynamic GPU thing going through. That’s a bit of a technical challenge at-least on Nixos
What's a dynamic GPU?
Yeah it was dead simple on Nixos. I just grabbed the Nvidia section of the wiki. https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/NVIDIA
{
hardware = {
# Renamed from opengl.enable
graphics.enable = true;
# Most Wayland compositors need this
nvidia.modesetting.enable = true;
nvidia.powerManagement.enable = false;
nvidia.open = false;
nvidia.nvidiaSettings = true;
};
Sorry it’s called “hybrid graphics”
Oh that's neat, I'd never heard of it. Using the integrated graphics as well as a PCIE GPU. Cool.
Helps with battery life on laptops
Does the display not need to be plugged into the onboard port, then?
Not exactly sure what you mean by this
On a desktop I might use the integrated graphics as well if I could use its HDMI/DP port for an additional monitor. Since you mentioned a laptop battery, I am guessing that you are choosing to drive the built in display with either the integrated graphics or the Nvidia graphics card built in. Have I misunderstood?
No. I have a RTX 3050 Ti Laptop which I have not had many issues with. The biggest issue I have experienced was that a game completely froze at the same point every time. This was due to a regression in their drivers. They spent their sweet time fixing it to, and following the issue thread highlights one of the main issues with their drivers being non-free: extremely competent users providing logs and effort to troubleshoot, but unable to work on the fix themselves. And what seemed to be summer interns replying once in a while and nothing happening for a long while.
But that said, I find the hate overblown. You could get tge impression that running Linux on a machine with an Nvidia-GPU will instantly burn down your house or spawn a portal to hell. It will not. I will get an AMD card at the next crossroads, but I am not ditching my card now just because it is Nvidia. It works fine enough.
Older graphics cards (like mine in a laptop bought in 2014) were not supported by Nvidia except through the open source one. So the performance would be sub par.
i've never had any problems with em.
My Rtx3060 works perfectly, one small error with waking from sleep, which was easily resolved, performance is better than windows, had no trouble getting games running
No, it should work out of the box through the open source driver. But, for most people the Nvidia driver (closed) works without issues, you need to install it through driver manager app.
The complaints are more about lack of support for OS drivers. If using proprietary drivers is not a worry. Then they are fine. Often the OS stuff works if your set up is simple.
My advice. Do not upgrade to quickly. They tend to have errors in their new proprietary drivers. Watch and see how others have done. Before upgrading essential machines.
The other issue. For non rendering. Their latest models performance to £$ etc is getting very bad. But blender still has major speed advantages on Nvidia. But that is looking more and more short term as blender grows.
On EndeavourOS, you just have to run nvidia-inst. Mint has the driver manager, and other distros have ways of handling it. For your card, you'll want the Nvidia Open driver if it doesn't do it automatically.
TLDR: These days it's easy.
I can also vouch for PoP_OS!, get the .iso with baked-in nVidia drivers and you will have no problems. The biggest issue I've had so far is that sometimes, after updating graphics drivers, FPS get stuck at like ~10 and I need to reboot. But happens rarely, and it takes ten seconds to fix
(Not mint)* On arch i used the arch install script, selected the nvidia drivers, and it just worked. I did have to spend some time making sure sure my nvidia gpu was my primary gpu and not my integrated graphics (cpu), but that was the biggest hurdle
Honestly it isn't much of a problem anymore, whether you choose a gaming specific OS or not.
Here's how to get good Nvidia support on Fedora 43:
For the driver:
sudo dnf update
sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia
For CUDA support:
sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda
Then reboot and you're done.
Best you can so is test it for yourself.
I switched to Linux Mint in February and my 4070 has given me no issues.
I just had to set some configs in steam so that it defaults to using my 4070 and not my iGPU, and the rest just worked
Lofs of distros such as Bazzite, Nobara, CachyOS all have premade nvidia ISOs avaliable making it easy to jump ship.
Nobara has a fantastic driver manager and system updater
There should be no trouble getting it to work, there may however be a slight chance of it breaking on an update, at least with some rolling distros, if you use the proprietary drivers, which you'll want to use it you care about performance.
The drivers need to be compatible with the kernel. In rare cases a kernel update will not be compatible with the nvidia driver and could get installed before the nvidia update has dropped. This is possible for openSUSE Tumbleweed for example because the nvidia drivers come from an nvidia managed repo that can get behind the official repos. Just being conservative about waiting a few days before applying kernel updates, especially for a significant version change, and checking the forums for people having problem is enough to avoid this problem.
A 4060ti has been out long enough that you're fine with basically any main stream distro.
I think even the 50 series is fine now with most mainstream distros as well.
I still prefer arch based distros now for Nvidia cards and honestly, Fedora is great!
I have multiple linux computers, from servers to a surface tablet, i am able to use all different generations of all nvidia, both permanently installed, and eGPU. It is not without any issue, but it works and is usable.
For me issues stem from x11 vs wayland (work computer is ubuntu due to company policy), or egpu shenanigans which I feel is platform agnostic
I had a 1060 for a good few years that I used primarily with Arch and never really had an issue. At the time it didn't play nicely with Wayland, so I was still using Xorg instead, but I think that's a solved issue by now. Nvidia just doesn't support newer features as readily as AMD does it seems. It really should have no bearing on your ability to play games.
My Nvidia works flawlessly. It’s only a 1060gtx but I’m running 570 drivers and the only real issue is it’s not open source.
If you just want to do pedestrian activities like gaming and desktop stuff, you're fine with the average nvidia driver install tutorial, and it's pretty trivial.
If you want more niche or advanced features like HDR tuning in Wayland or using cuda applications, you may want to consider that amd drivers are actually open and allow you to get into those kinds of tunables.
That said, there are still features and performance kept away from the user with nvidia, despite their never-ending promises of making drivers open, and nvidia has been rewarded for being not open on Linux, which a lot of us don't like. I personally am one of those and my stance with nvidia is partly one of principle.
This is the biggest hurdle nowadays with Nvidia:
NVIDIA GPUs generally experience a performance penalty when running DirectX 12 games on Linux, with reports indicating a drop of 15-30% compared to Windows. This is largely attributed to driver optimizations and the overhead from using translation layers like Proton and Wine.
To be clear, these are game problems, not NVDIA GPU problems. Some games only work on Windows and need to use a translation wrapper, which has overhead.
Check my history but basically no. It's not so hard.
I'm on Debian stable yet place the latest games, from VR to flat ones, from AAA to indies, and it just works.
Maybe I spent 30min https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers months ago (years now? time flies) when I did my install and since then smooth sailing. I have minor issues, e.g. suspend sometimes hang. Sometimes coming back from sustain some visual glitches in the browser via WebGL, but that's it.
Edit: I sometimes also use the GPU for CUDA for local AI/LLM (mostly to make sure it's bullshit, and it is but at least I can say I tried) and that also went well, just followed instructions.
The main difference is your mileage may vary with Nvidia, whereas it's pretty much always just going to work with AMD. But give it a shot and see how it goes. Make sure to choose a distro that specifically supports Nvidia.
I imagine a 4060TI is a relatively valuable card that you could trade for AMD if you really wanted to.
the ONLY issues I've ever had with my Nvidia GPU were with A. Sway and B. Mint.
and when I say "issues" with Sway it was simply not being able to use a DM to login to it and having to login via TTY with "sway --unsupported-gpu" since the Sway devs aren't fans of proprietary stuff at all.
for Mint...just didn't work well for gaming. Crashing, slow downs, etc. That could either be a Distro issue or a Me issue as Mint was my first linux distro and I only stuck with it for a couple weeks before moving on to CachyOS.
On every distro since then? zero issues. it just works. Best experience with it was probably via CachyOS or NixOS. Runs smooth as silk on NixOS.
No, it’s not hard. By default open source drivers will run, but you can install the nvidia ones through driver manager and everything should just work.