What video card do you have? Do you plan to use the machine for gaming?
Geforce 3060, and yes. Sometimes my primary screen gets locked at my secondary screen’s framerate. The whole OS is especially wonky after wake from sleep, I often have to restart Firefox and Cinnamon after wake. WebGL things in Firefox are especially finicky. The panel-applet-spice things are horrendously single-threaded, some of lock the whole UI regularly.
I’m going to try some other Debian-based OS in the hopes that this is just Mint+Cinnamon and not the state-of-the-art.
I’d suggest trying a gaming focused distribution. I’m running Ubuntu on my machine. Now using Nvidia but previously with AMD and used the Nvidia for VFIO (passing through the GPU to a virtual machine). I’ve had a lot of trouble switching to Nvidia with my current install, especially Snap apps like Firefox and electron apps like VS Code. Snap apps are sandboxed and don’t get appropriate permissions for GPU acceleration. Firefox decodes video on CPU for example.
I did try several distributions when I had the AMD Radeon as primary GPU and overall had good success passing through Nvidia card to the VM. I tried Ubuntu (2023.10 I think?), Debian, Fedora, and Bazzite.
Debian doesn’t have snaps unless you want them and seemed to work Ok. Bazzite and Fedora both worked well.
The main difference it seemed was using Flatpak. You can install a flatpak GPU driver for your Nvidia card and then all the problems go away. Flatpak steam games get to run at full frame rates whereas you’d need AMD for snap.
Also it seemed like some problems were caused by Gnome, issues that are supposed to go away in the future but are nasty now. The gnome Videos/Totem app totally fails on Ubuntu 24.04/wayland/nvidia. It’s possible to get it to work but it’s so much trouble that I wouldn’t recommend it.
KDE Plasma didn’t seem to have these issues. There are things I don’t like about KDE but overall it seemed to work better. It even has dumb features like controlling the brightness of your monitor when connected via USB, a nice feature that even MacOS required a third party app to match.
Everyone has a strong opinion on the subject but if you don’t have a specific need, I’d try Bazzite next. You already know it will work with Nvidia because of the gaming focus. It has KDE so you avoid some Gnome issues. Browsers are the default app of any OS so you know the game/steam expectation means the browser should work as well.
Good luck and please update us with what you figure out!
Sektor@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I switched to mint 3 weeks ago at the gentle age of 48 and so far it’s excellent. I had several issues which i almost all solved with googling and some AI. And I don’t know anything about programing. AND IT DOESN’T PUSH ANYTHING ON ME, IT’S UNREAL.
newbeni@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Isn’t it lovely? I switched like 15 years ago but I still appreciate everyday not having some new “feature” being shoved down my throat.