Please help with distro decision - eviltoast

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?

  • Molecular0079@lemmy.worldEnglish
    91·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Ihnivid@feddit.deEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      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).

      • Molecular0079@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • Ihnivid@feddit.deEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Ah, thanks for clearing that up. Will keep that in mind when I’m finally upgrading my system.

      • Botzo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I think they’re saying that Nvidia hardware doesn’t benefit from being at the bleeding edge, so stable, LTS style distros will also work just fine.

        As far as AMD vs Nvidia today, I can confidently say that you’ll have a far better time with an AMD GPU at the bleeding edge.