My teenage son wants to try a new distro for gaming. Our family has been using pop os for years, but he wants to try something new. The main three I see are

  • nobara (fedora based)
  • garuda (arch based)
  • drauger (ubuntu based)

The machine he’s using is a 2018 Intel nuc. It has a strong processor (core i7) but no discrete graphics. I can’t tell which (if any) of the distros above would be better or worse for his case.

Reading around, it seems like Garuda might be slightly more fiddly. And, Drauger I only saw mentioned in a couple of articles, but not on this forum. Are these impressions correct? Do you have any other advice for us?!

  • mateomauiEnglish
    2·
    7 months ago

    Yeah, there’s a few layers to the assistant programs. I should clarify there’s a “Garuda Welcome” program that contains “Garuda Assistant”, “Gamer”, “Settings Manager”, “Network Assistant”, “Boot Options”, etc, where you’ll find various parts of setup, but the main unintuitive part is that there’s a “Setup Assistant” button at the bottom separate from all that, where it does a system update, then provides a tabbed interface for installing non-gaming related programs. You see it when it first installs, and it took me a bit to figure out how to get back to that dialog because I was looking in all the other places, and thought “Setup Assistant” was just for initial setup.

      • mateomauiEnglish
        3·
        7 months ago

        Should also clarify that not all programs are available from the welcome/assistant. There’s also Octopi which is the standard package manager, and you can install other package managers from the assistant program.

      • mateomauiEnglish
        2·
        7 months ago

        Should also add a tip that sometimes on a reboot the system may not display anything until you turn the whole thing off and on again. To fix that you go to the boot manager settings in the welcome program and add “nomodeset” to the end of kernel parameters for each linux distro. May need to repeat this after a major update that updates grub, but the param is usually still there in the boot settings program, you just have to select the distro option and click “Apply” to reenable it.