Little help here linux guys? Trying to figure out what distro to use
Yeah. It's another one of these. But! Here me out! So I have some experience using Linux. Run some VMs for services I run in my home, I switched my surface book 3 (funnily enough) to ubuntu for my work computer as I was getting more and more frustrated by windows 11 and it turned out really good. Was able to completely get off windows and i didn't miss out on anything. Now. Ive been trying to migrate my gaming rig to Linux with... Not a lot of success. I have 3 monitors plugged into it, a Samsung crg49 and then 2 small no name brand monitors I like for websites and discord and stuff while I play on the Samsung monitor. On windows it works flawlessly. No Linux distro I've used has been able to handle it and I'm not sure how I should be approaching this. Running games has been fine. I use lutris and have been able to play pretty much everything I've wanted to with some tweaking. But whether a few hours or a few days, eventually I start having issues with the displays. Monitors will black out. Not boot. Eventually the whole system just stops working in a way that I can figure out. I have a ryzen 3700x, and a Nvidia 2080ti. 64GB of RAM. all my storage is nvme. I have tried most major distros. Mostly Ubuntu is what I have experience with. I have tried some others like nobara, but performance was awful, and display management was an issue. Ive never really installed other desktop environments other than what comes with those distros, so if it's a matter of "use distro x, but you need to install weyland" then sure. Just let me know that's something I need to do. 😋 So... What do you suggest I run? I really dont want to go back to windoze. It's just awful these days.
I can't really give you advice but maybe my current set-up can give you some ideas.
My desktop has an AMD Ryzen 5 3500 for my CPU and an AMD‌ Radeon RX 7600 for the GPU and some 16GB of RAM. I have two cheap monitors both connected via HDMI and are 1080p 75Hz. My desktop runs Arch Linux with KDE Plasma 6 Wayland, and aside from some minor keyboard-related issues, it's running fine. My desktop set-up could be just bog-standard that things just work, but there ya go.
I am not telling you to install Arch Linux, not unless you're willing to dive into the Arch Wiki, lots of forum posts and the occasional Stack Overflow thread whenever you've got a problem—not to mention dive into the command line and read lots of arcane logs to even start to know what to search for online. However, if your problems are due to lack of software support or something similar, then with Arch (or really, Arch-based distros, just stay away from Manjaro) and its wide array of packages, you might just be able to make things work for your hardware.
Honestly arch always sounded exhausting to me. I'm fine with cli interfaces but arch always came across as requiring a lot of personal investment that I wasnt really ready for. Might be my best option at this point tho
Regardless of what distro you do end up using, the Arch Wiki is a great bookmark to have. The info is like 90% relevant to Linux in general, and at worst you might need to figure out what a file path or package might have changed to in the likes of Ubuntu or Fedora.
Yeah, using Arch is a commitment. On top of having to keep your system relatively up-to-date (this is probably the easiest part though), you also have to be ready to do some work in resolving problems when they do crop up (usually after an update, lol).
However, I think most of the work in using Arch is the installation process, making sure things run smoothly after installation, and hammering out the kinks that may arise. After that, so long as you keep your system relatively up-to-date (and having resolved any issues resulting from updates), it's mostly hassle-free.
The only other distro (or rather, OS) that I think has as wide a source for installable software is NixOS, but not only I haven't any experience with it, it's still relatively new and wouldn't recommend it for daily-driving, much less gaming.
But yeah, Arch is definitely not for the faint nor half-hearted, but it might just work out for you. Good luck and may you be able to find a Linux distro that works with your hardware.