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).
I'd go with Arch, or EndeavourOS if installing Arch isn't your idea of fun.
It gets the newest drivers first and the AUR includes basically every software available for Linux.
Go with KDE, since it's much saner than Gnome, and use the proprietary nVidia drivers. Anything else will limit your performance.
Don't worry about sudden breakage, that's a thing of the past. A good practice is to put the following in your .bashrc:
alias update="yay -Pw ; sudo pacman -Syu ; yay -Syu ; sudo find /etc -name *.pac*"then use the
updatecommand to update.yay -Pwshows all new items in the Arch news since your last update. A couple times a year there are messages about updates requiring manual intervention in there.sudo pacman -Syu ; yay -Syuupdates the Arch packages first, then the AUR packages. Seperating these is good in case there are dependency issues. That way, your base system still updates fine, even if the dependencies of an AUR package are out of sync. (This never happened to me in 10 years, but I do it out of principle)sudo find /etc -name *.pac*lists all config files where there's a new version available, but your old config wasn't overwritten cause you've changed that manually.(You can get even more fancy with updating your mirrorlist first, always checking for keyring updates first, checking for orphaned or abandoned packages, etc. but lastly, system maintenance can never be fully automated)
(If this seems too complicated, you'll be happier with a different distro)