I’ve been quite happy with my Steam Deck - both as a gaming console and as a secondary computer when it’s docked, but for newer titles I picked up a Rog Zephyrus M16 (2023) last year.
Now that Windows is going off the deep end with AI, I’m looking to dual boot/trial Linux on this laptop with the goal to give Microsoft the boot.
It’s a beefy laptop:
13th Gen i9-13900
32GB Memory
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070
1TB NVMe (Windows)
2TB NVMe (Linux)
I added the second drive to avoid any issues with dual-booting with Grub/Windows Bootloader - instead making the Linux device the primary boot device and spamming Esc if I want to change to the Windows drive.
For distributions, I’m most familiar with Debian/Ubuntu - it’s the daily driver for my work laptop, and the vast majority of my home lab VMs are Ubuntu. With the Steam Deck, I started to get more into Arch with the Steam Deck, and now it’s the OS of choice for my HTPCs for simple streaming/Plex media player. I’ve also messed around with ZorinOS (basically a fancy skinned Ubuntu).
I need some advice on what to throw on this laptop - and some suggestions on how to squeeze the best performance out of this (Optimus vs. Proprietary NVIDIA vs. Open source drivers).
Fedora KDE spin. Should be similar to your Steam Deck desktop mode and it is most likely to land KDE 6.1 very soon, which improves the Nvidia experience a lot due to explicit sync.
I think the RPM Fusion repo for the nvidia drivers is enabled by default so that you can easily install them.
Fedora KDE spin. Should be similar to your Steam Deck desktop mode and it is most likely to land KDE 6.1 very soon, which improves the Nvidia experience a lot due to explicit sync.
I think the RPM Fusion repo for the nvidia drivers is enabled by default so that you can easily install them.