So I’ve been running Windows on my gaming system and Linux on my laptop for Uni for a while. I chose this to discourage working instead of relaxing, or gaming instead of working. However, I am finding that I often get the opportunity to work from home and I find it easier to just use my laptop on the go (I have a dual monitor setup + kvm switch so its a little annoying to have to come home and run 3 cables just for some extra screen realestate).
I want them to run the same OS so I can use the same tools and workflow. I use Ubuntu 23.04 on my laptop, W11 on my PC. I have nvidia GPU’s in both (1660 Super Desktop and 3050 Laptop), so installing and maintaining drivers would ideally be easy. I would use Ubuntu but I plan to move away from it since they’re moving away from .debs. Any recommendations? I am looking for stability, but something I can game on. I’ve never had a linux gaming pc so I don’t know how much that changes things. I don’t want to do much tinkering, I am more of a set an forget type.
I generally prefer Gnome, XFCE, KDE, Cinnamon, Mate in that order. I looked it up and a lot of the games I play are Proton DB Gold or up. The only game with an anticheat that I play is the MCC and I’ll just disable the anticheat if its an issue.
Try pop os. It’s based on gnome and uses debian, so stable and similar to what you’re used to. It doesn’t need any configuration and handles hybrid graphics(when laptops have both an integrated gpu and a dedicated gpu) by default.
+1 for pop os. Didn’t take much to get the programs I needed to work (davinci resolve needed a little help recognizing the graphics cards on my laptop and desktop which are Nvidia and AMD respectively), and every game I’ve tried on steam has run just fine (except vermintide 2, but that’s a proton issue).
Ended up installing it on my surface go 2 as well, because the default desktop environment (gnome) works well with touchscreens, though I had to switch to Wayland to get smoother scrolling.