I’ve been maining Linux for a couple years now on Nvidia and it’s… awesome. It is not the nightmare it used to be, assuming you use the Nvidia drivers. I’ve not found anything in my Steam library I can’t run. Same with Heroic.

I prefer CachyOS but Bazzite I’ve heard good things about as well. I’ve successfully used Fedora and a handful of others also (but I refuse to try Ubuntu - not a fan), so, pick your flavor and try it out.

Now it’s to the point where I rarely have to visit protonDB… most games just work (I use cachyos’ proton build as my default).

Give it a shot. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

I have an almost 20 year old laptop with an i5 and a 1050ti, installed CachyOS and it just works. Afaik it uses igpu by default, havent tried much yet but i can see that the laptop is pretty silent normally and gamee run well with a command that makes them use dgpu.

I’m m running bazzite on an Alienware m15 laptop, with an i7 & a 1070ti. Works great, no issues at all. When my last machine died, I rolled the dice on an HP Envy refurb machine with an i9 and a 4070 Ti Super (cheapest I could find with 16gb vram). I daily drive LMDE on it, also works perfectly. This is a desktop though to be fair.

No.

It’s fine. Asus laptop with Intel/Nvidia (2023ish), all-AMD desktop (2026ish), both fine with CachyOS. No issues to note really

I installed CacyOS on my MSI laptop with Nvidia m2060 + igpu and Intel CPU a couple of months ago. I can play genres through Steam just fine. It performs better than it did on Windows 11.

I’ll be honest, I was amazed I had no issues getting it running. CachyOS has sone great tools to set things up and their wiki is excellent. I just followed the steps in there to set up GPU switching. I disabled secure boot, since that can get in the way of drivers loading, but they have instructions for that as well.

Wi-Fi worked out of the box. I even have a luks encrypted root.

The main issue I had was MSI specific hardware, like battery charging control, normally managed by the Dragon Center. I found an open source replacement for that.

I can’t speak to the battery performance since I always use it plugged in. It’s a few years old so it’s probably not great anyway.

Your mileage may vary. It’s probably going to be more off a struggle with hardware specific to the model of laptop rather than Nvidia.

It’s not a nightmare, but I’ll still go with AMD next time. I think NVIDIA does a really poor job with drivers still. I keep having sleep issues.

I have an Intel + Nvidia laptop, it works as it should. Is it a recent laptop?

i got a used thinkpad with nvidia t1000 about a year ago. i installed kubuntu on it, chose the proprietary driver from the driver manager thingy and rebooted.
i forget the driver is even a thing. it switches to it automatically when i start a game, and it uses intel igpu when on battery. not a single issue yet and I’ve used it almost daily.

Been using for some 2~3 years now a Nitro 5 laptop almost always set to the Nvidia GPU. Issues are very rare, and some times compatibility is actually better than with the other GPU, the Intel one. Also worth noting I use Linux Mint though, and been some years since I last tested systems based Arch (btw).

I have been using NVIDIA under Linux since 2005, then in 2025 I switched to AMD. I have lots more problems with the Radeon, like the driver just crashing, taking the whole X server and all applications with it. That never happened with NVIDIA.

Gaming on a laptop is a path that will lead to failure eventually; get a desktop computer.

No idea.

But what you could do is buy the laptop, install Linux on it, troubleshoot it if there is any issue, and document the solution online in a blog/wiki post or YouTube video for others to see.

That could be your contribution to the community.

Use Mint and you’ll be fine.

I’m running a 13th gen core i9 and an rtx 4070 on my rog zephyrus. It runs CachyOS beautifully.

No complaints for the two-ish years I’ve had it.

Laptops are still a bit fucky. Manufacturers often put proprietary power savings and performance optimisation functionality that expects Windows install, and Linux can’t emulate properly.

I spent 3 hours getting a laptop to “work”; the quotes meaning it’s very “quirky”. Stuff like, don’t ever close the lid or you’ll have to suffocate restart it, had to turn off all power savings settings, a few things required deep research and sudo nano config files, etc.

It’s ok now and mostly works while plugged in, but be prepared.