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?!
He can also dual boot it between two distros. I have both Linux Mint Debian for stability and Garuda for current updates that benefit gaming. I recommend installing Linux Mint first and then Garuda, and use Garuda’s boot manager, which can also be customized pretty well from the setup assistant.
edit: by setup assistant I meant a program that’s available after initial install, not during install.
Oh yeah, the setup assistant from garuda sounds like it might be helpful for him.
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.