I’ve been using this hp gaming laptop with win10 since 2 years ago with an old dumb LG screen for coding/emulate (35%) or gaming (25%) and other 40% without the 2nd screen (browsing/documents).

I’ve used fedora/red hat in university but it was almost 10 years ago for specific software (emu/simulators) so I’m kind of noob in general terms and I’m afraid I’ll be leaving dual boot just in case.

I’ve read some posts before about out of the box distros (because the nvidia gtx 1650ti mainly) but I’m not sure if I should go for bazzite or cachyos or opensuse tumbleweed or a better distro that fits great in my case and about desktop, KDE (plasma) is my choice at the moment.

Thanks in advance.

Edit: I appreciate your comments and warnings (mainly about arch/gaming based distros and other tips). I didn’t want controversy but I use that laptop for almost everything at home and I’m realizing that I need to invest more time both learning and extracting backups because the machine is limited and I’m willing to become a full linux user in the mid term.

  • kyub@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    233·
    1 day ago

    Since you only mentioned 25% gaming, I’d recommend against a gaming-centric distro like Bazzite. Instead, use a generalist desktop distro.

    Since you mentioned that you’re rather new-ish, I’d recommend against Arch-based distros like CachyOS. Instead, check out e.g. Fedora, Mint, OpenSuSE. (Probably in that order of priority)

    These aren’t hard recommendations, so you can do whatever and probably be fine either way, but it still doesn’t fit that well.

    • CommunistEnglish
      4·
      13 hours ago

      Why not bazzite? It’s just kinoite with some extra stuff installed, some of which is very nice (patent things that make twitch work for example)

    • Hawke@lemmy.world
      9·
      22 hours ago

      There’s nothing especially gaming-focused with bazzite that would interfere with general PC usage. I think it’s a great choice for “25% gaming”.

      The only thing is that there’s not a lot of distro-specific guidance out there, and the immutable concept is a bit new and unusual.

    • Fecundpossum@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      22 hours ago

      I’ve been all over the gamut of distros, arch based, Ubuntu based, you name it, and Fedora is it. It’s more bleeding edge than Ubuntu based distributions like Mint and Pop_OS, but not as high maintenance as Arch based distributions. When a Linux noob starts getting Pacman notifications about unmerged pacnew files, they’re going to get turned off pretty quick.

      Fedora is rock solid, clean, smooth, and generally free of issues for me for about two years now.