Hello All.
First, I have been daily driving Linux(POP_OS) for nearly a year and outside of some frustrations, it has been a great experience. I expect a certain level of weirdness and quirks. I was using my Windows laptop to get some stuff done, and wanted to listen to some music over Bluetooth. This is where I messed up. I guess recent Windows updates just kind of break Bluetooth?? Every fix I have googled and tried failed to fix the problem. I kind of expect this behavior from Linux. I don’t expect it from an OS developed by a For Profit company.
Long story short, recommend me a distro that runs well on an Asus laptop with an Integrated and Discreet GPU. If Windows breaks functionality, then there isn’t a big reason to keep a Windows Machine around. If you say Arch, I intend to bully you but I’m open to any suggestions. Microsoft isn’t worth keeping around, even as a backup/standby.
I appreciate you <3
Quick Edit: This received a lot more engagement than I thought. Thank you all for the recommendations. I’ll spin up some VM’s and test them out. Thank you all for the guidance. May your day/night/other be most excellent!
I have an ASUS ROG laptop with a dGPU and the dGPU is damaged, making it not run at all with Windows.
I used the Arch ISO, booted up with the “new nVidia…” option and installed it using the most straightforward process[1] as given in the Arch Installation wiki page.Works well. I use it for testing changes I make in KDE apps.
OK, maybe not “most”. I installed
dracutat first but then switched tomkinitcpio↩︎
I always recommend Mint to wundows converts. It looks like the windows UI, just works out of the box 99% of the time, and has a huge user base that is happy to provide assistance
Love Mint. I have LMDE on my archival machine. It’s good stuf
Distro choice matters less than it looks like, and it’s fairly subjective. As long as you stick to a serious and newbie-friendly distro, you should be fine - for example, you could simply keep using Pop!_OS, why change it?
That said, a few distros you might want to try:
- Mint - another newbie-friendly Ubuntu derivative. If you feel like you must try something else, but you don’t want it to be too far from your comfort zone.
- Debian - because it’s the grandfather of Pop!_OS (and Mint); it has some rough edges, but it’ll be a good learning experience. Note Stable tends to stick to really ancient packages.
- Fedora - it’s also newbie-friendly, but from another different family. If you feel like stepping outside your comfort zone.
Also note you can dual boot different Linux distros, just like you’re dual booting Pop!_OS and Windows. Or even multi-boot.
The best answer is always Ubuntu (Mint or Kubuntu). They just work. And they’re and they’re récent enough without running into problems. They have high compatibility and they have a lot of quality of life improvements.
Bazzite is stable and “just works” but it achieves that by being a bit less conventional under the hood. Great for gaming and general computing.
If you like tinkering around, you might want to pick something else though.
Arch is sweet but you’ll want some miles under your belt first. Pop is great, if you want boring but just works debian is the goat
I eouldnt recommend debian to anyone but corporate work due to gow out of date its packages get. Ends up causing more work for the end user.
Thanks for the recommendations! Bazzite seems like a good fit for this machine’s use case.
Be aware that Bazzite is an immutable distro. Your home directory is write enabled, but the rest of the filesystem is read-only.
If you’re used to apt-get and such, it’s a bit of a change. Most of your apps will be flatpaks or appimages.
Also it means system updates require a reboot.
You can’t run
apt-getetc. on your host, but the idea is that you create containers with whatever distribution you want through distrobox and run your commands in there. In effect, there’s pretty much no difference, especially if you set your terminal up to open into the distrobox.
Fedora is good. It gets regular updates and all the new tech. Once you set it up make sure to enable the non foss repos if you want stuff like discord
My experience is very dated, but I bought a used windows Asus laptop in 2013 and put Ubuntu on it and experienced no problems. I had been using Linux for a long time, so maybe I remember this with rose glasses, but it was very straight forward. Also an integrated GPU, but of the 2013 era. I think the laptop was a 2012 model.
Config isn’t hard, it just takes time 🙂
If you’re willing to run arch-based but not vanilla arch cachyOS is amazing in my experience.
If not that fedora is pretty ok. Could just run PopOS too if you like it.
Thanks for your thoughts. My experience with Arch has been weird. I can get everything mostly working, but sound has always been an issue on my current hardware. Black Arch was fun to mess around with because I didn’t necessarily care if sound output was borked. I will look into cachyOS and spin up a VM. Thank you friend!
Arch defaults to pipewire I think even if you select pulseaudio in archinstall (might have changed by now ofc) If your laptop is older pulseaudio might work much better (did for me)
I second cachy if they want an arch intro. It’s the “It just works” flavor of arch.
Garuda is pretty fucking awesome for an easy arch distro. Everything was installed correctly OOTB on my ASUS g733 with integrated/dedicated GPU so you don’t have to set Prime up yourself. Their KDE ricing in their dragonized version is the best I have found. Great gaming setup IMO. Easy beginner arch entry distro with all the bells and whistles. They have done a pretty good job with their garuda-update pacman wrapper and seems to handle most of the manual intervention during updates, uses reflector for mirrors on update too. Btrfs and snapper setup by default so rollback is easy as pie.
Been wanting to try catchy for a while though.
Fedora is a great option as well. Stable, well built and easy. Don’t really like flatpak that much but that’s just a personal preference. I really like dnf. Defiantly a good choice beginner distro.
I expect a certain level of weirdness and quirks.
Me, every time I switch on a Windows machine. 😉
Arch feels more like windows because I like keeping everything up to date, cachyos because I dont want to spend an hour finding the gaming packaged and I like the preinstalled apps + de options. Plus aur is great just need to add flathub support real quick and its great.
Lot of bootloader options too, I like limine since its clean and easy to swap lernels, also one click to setup btrfs snapshots after install which also show up in limine with no extra setup.
My list to try would be Debian, Fedora, or OpenSuse. I’m partial to KDE.
Hell yeah Debian or OpenSUSE. Debian is rock solid, but OpenSUSE is more current.
I happen to have an Asus laptop with an intel igpu (one of those flippy 2-in-1), and Fedora Workstation works for me since I like the look of GNOME. Fedora also has a KDE version if you prefer that. Keep in mind that Fedora uses “dnf” and “.rpm” instead of “apt” and “.deb”. Lots of people also like to use Mint (which is based on debian like Pop_OS) but I haven’t tested that with my laptop.
I might check out Fedora. Is switching between the iGPU and dGPU relatively straightforward?
I don’t have a dGPU to test that, sorry. One thing about the intel igpu though, I had to install a few drivers to get hardware acceleration to work with OBS
As you already use Pop, why change? Is there something bothering, or something does not run well? How old is this laptop?
If you don’t feel like continuing with Pop, I’d try Debian as you value stability. It may be a slight pain to set up initially, but when it’s done it should generally Just Work until eternity. The expert installer allows you to enable non-free repos for any proprietary drivers by default.
POP_OS runs great and it’s my primary OS on my System76 machine. My issue seems to be more to do with Nvidia Drivers. Nothing that’s a deal breaker, but the Machine Spirit needs appeasement on occasion. I’m actually really excited for COSMIC to be released.
On my Asus machine, I’m just tired of Windows and want to familiarize myself with more of the Linux environment. It’s maybe 2 or 3 years old at this point
Right, okay. If you want to fool around as you have a stable daily driver already, sure get a more DIY distro or just try out multiple things before settling. Debian should do the trick though, it’s somewhat DIY while being very stable so the updates rarely break anything. But you might also like Arch, or NixOS, or just Mint. I think the point is it’s just not very easy to predict how each of these is gonna actually run on your actual hardware. So to really find out you’ll have to install something and acknowledge you may need to re-do it a couple times before finding something that works for you.
