I've been quite happy with my Steam Deck - both as a gaming console and as a secondary computer when it's docked, but for newer titles I picked up a Rog Zephyrus M16 (2023) last year.
Now that Windows is going off the deep end with AI, I'm looking to dual boot/trial Linux on this laptop with the goal to give Microsoft the boot.
It's a beefy laptop:
- 13th Gen i9-13900
- 32GB Memory
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070
- 1TB NVMe (Windows)
- 2TB NVMe (Linux)
I added the second drive to avoid any issues with dual-booting with Grub/Windows Bootloader - instead making the Linux device the primary boot device and spamming Esc if I want to change to the Windows drive.
For distributions, I'm most familiar with Debian/Ubuntu - it's the daily driver for my work laptop, and the vast majority of my home lab VMs are Ubuntu. With the Steam Deck, I started to get more into Arch with the Steam Deck, and now it's the OS of choice for my HTPCs for simple streaming/Plex media player. I've also messed around with ZorinOS (basically a fancy skinned Ubuntu).
I need some advice on what to throw on this laptop - and some suggestions on how to squeeze the best performance out of this (Optimus vs. Proprietary NVIDIA vs. Open source drivers).
Honestly, it doesn't really matter, pick the one you're most familiar with. Performance-wise, distros are largely the same, unless the distro ships really old libraries or something.
So I recommend either Debian or Arch since that's what you're familiar with.
If you want to try something new, consider openSUSE MicroOS. It has a readonly root like Steam Deck, and you interact with it in transactions, so you get a really solid system. Theoretically. I haven't actually used it, but I do plan to once I need ti reinstall one of my Tumbleweed systems (or maybe I'll reinstall my Leap NAS at some point).
And yeah, avoid the nvidia open source drivers. It's a cool project, but performance sucks because nvidia refuses to provide technical documentation.