got a great deal at an estate sale, i9-9900k, 32gb ddr4, rtx 2070 for $350.
I started with debian but unfortunately it’s an Nvidia card. the big thing I want to try with this thing is emulating bloodborne, and maybe local AI models so performance is key.
will I be fine with debian or are the packages just too old?
Get Arch on there if you’re looking for bleedng edge, no bloat performance.
The wiki has some points on nvidia drivers too
Just mint or fedora, you’ll be fine.
I would second this. They key as a beginner I think is to choose a distro with a reasonable release cycle, give yourself some room to breathe.
Debian is too slow, their release cycle is basically 2 years. You could use Testing or Unstable instead of Stable but they’re not officially meant for public consumption and come with no guarantees. It’s great as a minimalist, rock-solid foundation for a server where stability is paramount but not great for any purpose with a faster pace of technology.
Arch-based distros on the other hand are extremely fast (“rolling distro”). Most of them sit in the range between “drinking from the firehose” (release packages as fast as they come in) to something like 2 weeks for a “slow” distro like Manjaro.
Distros like Mint, Fedora, Ubuntu, PopOS have ~6 month release cycles so you end up with reasonably recent packages but not too recent to catch all the new bugs.
This
Fedora is life.
For me it replaced every other distro, since the minimal install of its fedora Server flavour is just aß minimal as debian
I’ve been using bazzite with an nvidia card for almost a year. No issues.
A good starting point is the pinned post “Understanding Linux and choosing your first Linux distro, v2.0”. In doubt, just take something like Linux Mint as a general operating system or a gaming oriented one like Bazzite.
I use debian with Nvidia graphics. The drivers are available in the repos and work fine
Zorin OS is a good first option. Everything Just WorksTM
Don’t recommend niche distros to beginners, these have next to no community support and tend to disappear overnight
Zorin OS is hardly a niche distro. Is it?
Zorin IS is derived from Ubuntu - 99% of Ubuntu’s guide will work with it.
You know this because you use it. The person for whom this is their first Linux doesn’t. Why not recommend Ubuntu or Mint?
Endeavouros has nvidia included
I’d go catchy just for the bootloader btrfs support. If you fuck something up just go to your last image and its not fucked up anymore. Basically save states for learning linux
nvidia is not that bad on linux anymore. all people usually have is small annoyances, big issues are uncommon on major distros.
debian probably works. but if you want the best performance and games, newer packages are usually better, yes.
Well. I still hate nvidia under Linux. Mesa support is bad. Drivers for gaming still require you to install the proprietary drivers. While Amd has the kernel drivers sitting directly into the kernel. New kernel. New drivers! Jeej.
yeah, it’s not ideal and amd is heavily preferred. though if you manage to score a 2000-series and up geforce for a good price, it will work.
did this happen to be from the radio free asia sale?
I think CachyOS is very nice - it’s as simple to setup as Bazzite for gaming but you don’t have to virtualize software that doesn’t come as a flatpak so it’s more flexible. As another commenter said, btrfs gives a really nice safety margin. The only prpblem is that Arch-based distros like Cachy should be updated quite frequently(I wouldn’t go longer than two weeks) so its not good for secondary PCs you interact with infrequently.
Linux mint. And use the drivers gui to easily pick and install the tested nvidia (proprietary) driver under Linux.
I’d recommend NixOS. Everything just works with a few lines of code (Nix is not that bad, it just takes a lil’ bit of reading).
Most people will recommend Linux Mint. I’d like to recommend Fedora. Fast, reliable, looks good (especially the KDE plasma version) and stays out of your way when you do things. I’ve been using linux as a daily driver for the past 8 months and Fedora has become something I’m so used to, that I really can’t see changing at all.
That’s not normal, Debian works fine with NVIDIA cards including with their proprietary drivers. You can follow https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers
How do I know? Been running such a setup for years including for gaming, even VR gaming, and tinkering with local AI models for evaluation (and disappointment) and works well.
