this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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What about for Nvidia GPUs?
People keep saying you can't use Nvidia GPUs with Linux or that the experience is horrible, but truth be told, if you already have one, you can keep it no problem. The main scenario where it still had issues as of last year was if you used KDE Plasma with Wayland on Nvidia (though I hear Plasma 6 improved a lot of it - not sure, because I didn't have a lot of issues on Plasma 5 either).
Your best bet for Nvidia GPUs is an Ubuntu-based distro. Ubuntu itself is an option though not necessarily the best - they bake in some ads and a lot of people aren't fans of being forced to use Snap, which has a proprietary backend unlike Flatpak. Personally I'd say go for Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop if you want a Windows-like desktop environment and Pop!_OS if you want something completely different altogether from Windows. On Mint or Ubuntu you can install the drivers from the provider proprietary driver installer (super simple), on Pop!_OS you can just get a Nvidia iso and have them preinstalled.
But honestly, I didn't even have issues with Nvidia when I was on Gentoo, supposedly one of the harder distros to maintain.
Would I buy a Nvidia GPU now that I've completely ditched Windows? Probably not, but I'm also not in a hurry to replace my 3060 Ti just to get rid of the logo.
Nvidia support got better, I'm using it on NixOS with Wayland gnome and games have better FPS than last year, I'm maxing out my 280Hz 1080p monitor with older games
Nvidia just requires a driver install on most distros, and the newer drivers for Linux run rather well. All but one of my games runs better on Linux than on Windows (MK1 has slowdown issues on cinematics)
My 1080 was okay with Linux Mint, no complaints, and performance is the same from what I can tell. :)