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I'm on the market to buy a new laptop, and Lemmy has successfully coaxed and goaded me to give Linux a serious try.
I've never used *nix as my personal OS.
Which hardware/laptop do you recommend? And which OS to pair it with for a Linux newbie?
I'm a software engineer, and quit my job to pursue an MSc in AI. So my uses will be:
Linux runs on literally anything. The hardware doesn't matter too much these days, but which distro you pick does. I would say to just load a flash drive with a live image of a distro you think looks cool and see how you like it on a trial basis. Try a couple of them before you reqlly make a decision and then load the full image
WiFi, Bluetooth and Nvidia graphics have entered the chat
Fingerprint reader and webcam standing by
The proprietary Nvidia graphics drivers works pretty well in most distros. Just go to your distro's driver manager and enable the proprietary driver.
Nvidia cards can still be tricky, especially on optimus laptops. It's not nearly as problematic as it used to be, but I still run into occasional issues with it. If I ever buy a new computer for gaming, I'm going to go with AMD.
Linux gaming on laptops in GENERAL can still be tricky
Source: have both optimus and advantage laptops.
AMD mobile graphics tend to sometimes have less hiccups, but for the most part you are still going to have to tell the program to use the dGPU.
I don't mind telling the game to use a dedicated graphics card and I don't mind tinkering in general, but I want the graphics driver to work as expected. For example my Nvidia optimus setup doesn't always play nice with the external monitor and I'm currently dealing an issue where an nvidia specific setting is needed to get some games working, but that same setting causes issues in other games.
I did, and Iβd do it again next time. You can eventually convince NVIDIA cards to go, but relatively, AMD just works.
WiFi and Bluetooth yeah, if you run Linux mint setting up the proprietary drivers us literally like 2 buttons in the drivers menu
All distris that have GNOME look the same. Same for KDE. I wouldn't go the looks cool route
Distro choice doesn't matter too much. Even ubuntu if you ignore snaps
Gross.
I use manjaro xfce but i would reccommend fedora or mint if ya starting out. Fedora seems to just work most of the time hardware wise.