3d ago

I tried Debian, I tried Fedora for my Lenovo Legion 5 Pro RTX3060: Framerate issues, stuttering in browsers, stuttering in simple 3D programs

Hi all,

The quick and dirty questions is: Which distro should I try next?

I tried Debian X11 and Fedora with Wayland, but I did not have a great experience with them for my Lenovo Legion 5 Pro RTX3060. I installed proprietary drivers on both systems since people say that they're better than Nouveau, but the framerate stutters even in simple browser game.

I use some software to slice 3d models for printing, and that one stuttered too. I tried various fixes but none of them worked, and I'd really like to switch to Linux from Microsoft for my daily driver.

What distro can I use to have a better experience? Any advice is welcome, but please make it as specific as possible and if you can, address why that distro would be better than Debian 12 and Fedora 42.

Thanks in advance!

60 comments

Distros are a red herring. I used debian 12 (first gnome, then xfce) for more than a year with no problems, and the current version of Bazzite is also problem-free for me when it comes to nvidia prime (apart from a KDE-specific memory leak). Basically, this should be easily fixable without a fresh install.
I don't know what distro you're on atm, but set up prime-run and try running programs with that. I also recommend going onto the uefi and disabling secure boot. You can get it to work with proprietary nvidia drivers, but it's a bit of a process and unless you really need it you might as well leave it off for now.

It's still Fedora under the hood, but Nobara has a pile of graphics tweaks to enable video editing and gaming, by the developer of the Proton layer that Valve uses for Steam. It's optimized for high end graphics and nVidia cards.

NVIDIA mostly does fine with Wayland now IME. Running KDE Wayland on a Legion Slim 5 with RTX 4060 myself for over a year now, with minimal problems after the NVIDIA 550+ drivers came out.
I did have definite problems, including on X11, with the 535 drivers that the Debian repos were still using at last check. Your best bet is probably to install the latest drivers straight from NVIDIA's repos: https://docs.nvidia.com/datacenter/tesla/driver-installation-guide/index.html
That's what I ended up doing on a Debian-based distro, and it pretty much fixed my issues. There are specific instructions linked there for different supported distros.
My daily driver now is Garuda, which is essentially just Arch with a GUI installer and some extremely handy extra user-friendly tools bolted on. It's aimed at gaming, and so makes it extra easy to get the drivers set up and kept up to date. That is basically why I decided to give their installer a go in the first place after I got this laptop, to at least let it run hardware detection and see how it was configuring things, to tell where I might have been going wrong in my then-main distro. Then I liked the experience enough that I stuck around. It mostly just works.
Note: This would be from someone with experience on Arch. If you're not cool with rolling releases, that may not be a good choice. Garuda does default to a BTRFS/Snapper setup that makes it easy to just boot into a previous snapshot if anything does break, which does come in handy occasionally.
But, as other commenters have already said? The distro itself doesn't really matter. That's mainly just down to personal taste. The important part here is getting the right drivers and configuration going on whatever you do prefer to use. Some distros just make this easier than others

I second disabling Nouveau via blacklist, and I'm unsure if there is similar software for Lenovo, but I use asusctl to force the use of the Nvidia card over the integrated Vega graphics. This could very well be an issue with graphics card switching, so it's worth looking into.
As for distro recs, while most would probably recommended Linux Mint for beginners, I prefer to recommend Bazzite. It's Fedora-based, but comes with Nvidia drivers and lots of gaming optimization baked-in.

Bazzite
- Seconding this, Especially for the atomic stability and built in nvidia support

Check the lenovo legión discord server, there is a linux channel and they can help you better than here probably
- Interesting, thanks! Do you happen to have a link to it?
  
  https://discord.gg/legionseries
  IDK if it's the one but it has #linux channel

nvidia stutters on linux for me too and there was nothing i could do to fix. its better on x11.
ive also seen plenty of weird issues on nvidia laptops with switchable graphics.
please tell me if you ever find a solution.
- PopOS makes Nvidia life easy
  
  it does, but they don't fix the nvidia-specific bugs afaik, they just preinstall the driver.
  
  Dual booting PopOS seems pretty rough though, with risks to the windows installation and bootloader

I have non pro version and I disabled the iGPU in BIOS it worked on ubuntu but battery was nonexistent.
Recently I switched on the iGPU. Now I tried various distros and Arch and Bazzite worked out of the box.

It's not your fault because with nvidia gpu you have to add env variables to tell your pc that use nvidia prime, no matter what distro you use you have to configure env varibales, although I'll suggest you openSUSE-Tumbleweed and I was going to suggest you Fedora but you had problems so it's ok.

This could be an issue where the AMD GPU is only being used. I, like some of the others would suggest Linux Mint.

Does your laptop have 2 GPU’s?
NVIDIA Optimus sucks for Linux, I would suggest looking into EnvyControl and forcing your xorg & xrandr to use your NVIDIA GPU primarily and not the iGPU.

I don’t have experience with dual GPU laptops but from what I’ve heard PopOS handles them really well. They also have an image with the nvidia drivers preinstalled which should make the setup process straightforward
Edit: I also found this github repo which documents some fixes for issues on that device specifically. Not sure how many of these have been patched upstream by now but it’s worth checking out.

My choice is Arch Linux purely because it's bleeding edge
I've no idea if Arch actually has newer drivers than Debian / Fedora, but if they are you'll (usually) get better support from the developers of whatever application / package - or in your case - drivers that you're facing.
It's more involved than "just" installing Debian, etc... but reading through the Arch Linux wiki as you install will (should) ensure you've got the correct drivers setup and you'll know why they're working.
So... it'll be more effort, but you might get "better" results.
- I’ve no idea if Arch actually has newer drivers than Debian / Fedora
  Kinda, since Arch has nvidia's own drivers in their extra repo, whereas in Fedora you'll have to do some stuff to get them.

Try Ubuntu, it has a user friendly GUI for installing Nvidia and other 3 parts drivers.

My spouse has a laptop from Asus with VERY similar Specs (but an RTX 3050ti instead of a 3060) and so far Linux Mint has been a pretty trouble -free experience with ONE condition:
I set it to use the dedicated nvidia gpu 24/7 as opposed to the integrated AMD gpu. I forgot what exactly was happening but if memory serves it was disrupting something, I think recovering from closing the lid?
After doing that we’ve never had an issue again. They mostly use at their desk plugged in, sp the power usage isn’t much a concern.
Hope this helps!
- Was it hard to set it to always use the dedicated gpu?
  
  I don’t remember it being particularly difficult, I’m a bit of a linux newb myself, but I’d be lying if I said I remember which steps I took off the top of my head.

a distribution is just an assortment of packages, it's the same linux + driver underneath. nvidia on linux is a headache. are there people who made it work? sure. is that a worthwhile waste of your time? it is not.
get hardware that's linux supported and you'll have plenty of challenges during the transition, you don't need the additional "self destruction in..." countdown timer booming from the speakers.
if you still wanna have at it, pop_os (however it's spelt), bazzite and nobara are some od the distros that have dedicated nvidia install images and are thusly more likely to work OOB and work better afterwards.
- are there people who made it work? sure.
  For some historical context, Nvidia has had premium Linux support since 2006. For the longest time it was the only option for any kind of hardware accelerated 3D graphics on Linux and it generally worked pretty well.
  Thankfully, AMD made the open-source side of graphics on Linux work also recently. At least for two years, AMD GPUs have been entirely trouble-free on Linux. To my knowledge, Nouveau is not quite there yet.

Did you make sure that Nouveau was not loading? If both drivers are on the system, Nouveau usually ends up taking precedence unless it's been blacklisted. Also, if this is a laptop type with a hybrid graphics setup, you may need additional software to manage the handoff between GPUs (optimus, bumblebee, etc.)
- I've done some more digging and indeed, the AMD integrated GPU is being used. Optimus seems like a good option, but then apparently I'd have to use x11 as the desktop renderer because Wayland doesn't play nice with nvidia.
  As far as I can see, x11 will be deprecated not too long from now?
  
  OP, as someone who has a very similarly specced laptop:
  Install Linux Mint, do a one click install of the Nvidia driver with the mint GUI driver installer, and then open the application that's stuttering from your start menu by right clicking on it, and select 'run with discrete GPU', which will force it to use your Nvidia card.
  
  Mark my words, X11 will still be around as an option 10 years from now.
  Linux Mint, probably the most popular distro, doesn't even support Wayland in its default configuration, yet.
  
  Wayland's nvidia support is improving over time, but although it's becoming less popular, X11 isn't likely to be completely deprecated anytime soon—I'd expect any mainstream distro to still at least have it as an option a couple of years from now, to handle corner cases Wayland still doesn't support.
  The last X11 stable version bump on my distro was about a month ago, to 21.1.16, so it isn't like it's abandonware or anything.

That's odd, I remember using Debian 12 without this issue when it was released, I later switched to an Arch based distro (Endeavour OS) to experiment with how it would run games (they ran better, I think some games were freezing on Debian 12 stable).
I can't say anything about Fedora, never used it.
Do you have more information about the specific driver you installed on Debian 12 and Fedora 42? Like the version number? Maybe the neofetch result of your computer specs too.
Sorry for not being able to give more details.
- Thanks for your answer! I had 535 installed on Debian 12 and 570 on Fedora 42. This is the result of fastfetch (neofetch is EOL). Let me know if you need any more info or if you think you have something that might help. Thanks! System Details:
  OS: Fedora Linux 42 (Workstation Edition)
  Host: Lenovo Legion 5 Pro 16ACH (82JQ)
  Kernel: Linux 6.14.5-300.fc42.x8664
  Uptime: 30 mins
  Locale: enGB.UTF-8
  Hardware:
  CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800H (16) @ 4.46 GHz
  GPU 1: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile
  GPU 2: AMD Radeon Vega Series
  Memory: 4.30 GiB / 27.25 GiB (16%)
  Swap: 0 B / 8.00 GiB (0%)
  Disk (/): 23.09 GiB / 243.14 GiB (9%)
  Display: 2560x1600 @ 60 Hz
  Battery: 60% AC Connected]
  Software Environment:
  DE: GNOME 48.1
  WM: Mutter (Wayland)
  Theme: Adwaita
  Packages: 2490 (rpm), 12 (flatpak)
  Shell: bash 5.2.37
  Terminal: Ptyxis 48.1
  Network: 192.168.2.14/24 (wlp4s0)

Okay, I had the same problem with a 3060 laptop. The easy answer is : your next distro should be Nobara.
These errors happen because your computer does not use your Nvidia GPU but the AMD one. There is no hardware acceleration.
In Nobara, everything comes preinstalled and preconfigured. I didn't have those problems anymore.
(If you fancy masochism, you can also go the Arch or NixOS way)
- Thanks! I'm downloading nobara now, any tips to get it to work as expected?
  
  None ! That's the greatest thing. Take the time to read the welcome message (you know that window that come when you first boot any distro) and follow any instruction. It should work out of the box.

I have a desktop which has / had a similar problem.
Originally I built it with a g-series Ryzen which has integrated Radeon Vega graphics. Upgraded to a 3060 and wanted to run Linux for gaming instead of windows.
I couldn’t get a distro to reliably use my graphics card without the issues you describe. Stuttering, crashing, generally unusable.
Garuda was the answer (to be fair I’d try Bazzite too but I just didn’t get there as Garuda worked). In fact, it worked out of the box for me and I enjoyed it so much I made it my work OS.
I like the GUI utilities they’ve made for front-ending a bunch of Arch CLI utilities and I’ve been saved by BTRFS snapshots more than once.

Like others suggested here, the problem is probably nouveau and you might want to try a gaming-oriented distro which usually configure these things correctly out-of-the-box. My favourite is Nobara and Fedora (which didn't work for you but works for me because I have different hardware). People suggest Bazzite, but I cannot recommend it because it's based on Fedora Atomic, and I don't get along with Fedora Atomic.
As a general admittedly non-helpful suggestion, don't get Nvidia hardware if you want to use Linux.
- I tried Fedora but since they removed support of x11 and nvidia doesn't get along with wayland, I'm out of luck.
  
  pop os. most apps you can right-click to run on discrete graphics card, and they tried to make it gamer friendly.
  worth a shot, anyhow.

try installing btop and having a look at the gpu utilisation when you're running stuff

Give Linux Mint a spin, I seriously doubt there's a friendlier distribution for newcomers from Windows.
- But would it fix the core issues that OP is having?
  
  Not directly, I'm just giving OP the answer they wanted:
  The quick and dirty questions is: Which distro should I try next?

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