I’ve been quite happy with my Steam Deck - both as a gaming console and as a secondary computer when it’s docked, but for newer titles I picked up a Rog Zephyrus M16 (2023) last year.
Now that Windows is going off the deep end with AI, I’m looking to dual boot/trial Linux on this laptop with the goal to give Microsoft the boot.
It’s a beefy laptop:
- 13th Gen i9-13900
- 32GB Memory
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070
- 1TB NVMe (Windows)
- 2TB NVMe (Linux)
I added the second drive to avoid any issues with dual-booting with Grub/Windows Bootloader - instead making the Linux device the primary boot device and spamming Esc if I want to change to the Windows drive.
For distributions, I’m most familiar with Debian/Ubuntu - it’s the daily driver for my work laptop, and the vast majority of my home lab VMs are Ubuntu. With the Steam Deck, I started to get more into Arch with the Steam Deck, and now it’s the OS of choice for my HTPCs for simple streaming/Plex media player. I’ve also messed around with ZorinOS (basically a fancy skinned Ubuntu).
I need some advice on what to throw on this laptop - and some suggestions on how to squeeze the best performance out of this (Optimus vs. Proprietary NVIDIA vs. Open source drivers).
My first distro was Ubuntu and I’ve been very happy with it. Many hate it for being bloated or because of the snap package manager, but in my uninformed opinion I think it’s a solid choice for beginners, since everything is already set up and ready to go. On my laptop I’m trying out NixOS, but I’m having more trouble setting that up and it’s better for advanced users, I believe. Many also recommended Linux Mint, which is also good for beginners, but doesn’t have the snap package manager like ubuntu does.
Ubuntu is fine. It’ll do the job. I don’t prefer it, but it’s fine and works.
Kububtu is a good place to start, too. I notice that people recommend Ubuntu but some may be also including the other flavors when saying it. I think KDE is a nice DE, specially because of Dolphin.