I’m looking for a distro that will be able to get the most out of my graphics on an MSI Katana laptop.
Right now I have Debian Bookworm running the Nvidia binary driver, and the graphics lags a bit compared to when this laptop had Windows 11 on it.
I’m playing Final Fantasy XIV, and doing web browsing on it.
I’d like to stay with something Debian based and running Gnome. Ubuntu is not ideal because I have trust issues with Canonical since the Amazon ad debacle back in the late 00s.
Can y’all give suggestions for a distribution that might work better, or some tweaks that might optimize the performance on Debian?
Should I just wait for Trixie and see if that give better performance?
I’m just spitballing for ideas here. Thanks in advance for any advice.
If you don’t want to stray away from Debian, then I don’t think there’s anything better than PikaOS. It’s like Nobara but based on Debian instead.
It’s a relatively small distro, community-wise. But it has been around for some time, so I trust its longevity.
Other than that, as some other have mentioned, could be Pop!_OS.
If you’re willing to stray away from Debian, then a lot of other options become available. But I digress.
I’ll check this out tonight when I get home. Thanks!
I’d like to stay with something Debian based and running Gnome. Ubuntu is not ideal because I have trust issues with Canonical since the Amazon ad debacle back in the late 00s.
My time has come. This is precisely the use case for PikaOS.
Their Gnome implementation is top notch, imo, and they are a gaming distro based on Debian (not Ubuntu), using a lot of the same package optimizations as CachyOS and many of the fixes and tweaks from Nobara while still having that Debian base.
If you want a great gaming experience using Debian, you should do yourself a favor and at least try it out in a VM. Be sure to get the Nvidia version.
This is what I was looking for! I’ll check it out tonight. Thanks!
I’d try to invest some time first to fix the issue, before hopping between distros. Unless you haven’t installed anything, in that case, go ahead and just try 5 distros and see which one works best. Idk. Make sure you’re running the 535.216.01-1~deb12u1 drivers or whatever is current in Debian. See if you’re actually using the Nvidia card or a Intel iGPU whenever this happens. Some people have also claimed turning off the GSP firmware helps. You could try both Wayland and X11 and see if it’s the same issue. You could install newer drivers from Debian experimental. Or try Linux Mint Debian Edition if you want something very similar to Debian but not exactly it. And how do you measure graphics lag?
I measured it by playing the game. I’m getting caught in AoE attacks that I was easily able to avoid on windows.
I like popos, mostly after coming from crunchbangplusplus popos just works and I like the easy way of hitting the super key and typing what application I want to launch or switch too, not sure it would do anything for your issue tho
Fedora ain’t any better if trust issues are relevant.
In general, I don’t think you’ll find any distro running Nvidia the same as Windows. I had Fedora 41 a couple of months ago and flickering issues with my Gtx1050. No matter what drivers I tried, and I was debugging for a month, spent 50 hours on it with no solution.
After that tried Tumbleweed Slowroll, and it was a bit better. In the end, bought a new PC because it was time. Now running with AMD because I was told they have less issues than Nvidia. Turned out to be true in my case.
I wanted to run Tumbleweed with KDE so I adapted hardware specs to make it work.
Fedora runs well for me with a geforce graphics card.
