Probably trying to share a Stream drive between Linux and Windows. Trying to run games from NTFS just didn’t work and resulted in all kinds of weird issues. I was close to giving up on Linux but after I switched to an ext3 partition things just started working :|

AFAIK, this corresponds to the snap package of Steam.

In Fedora, Discover shows this in the top right corner. It also shows the available package sources under Settings. Perhaps this is not yet available in the older Debian version of Discover. You could also just look at the version of certain software. E.g., if GIMP is version 3.x it’s a flatpak (or snap), otherwise it’s a Debian package.

The Linux Experiment recently looked into touchscreen support of different desktop enviromenents. His findings mostly align with your comment. However, this seems to be one of the rare cases where the distro matters for Gnome. Upstream Gnome (e.g., as shipped by Fedora) works fine with touch screens, but support on Ubuntu Gnome appears to be quite broken.

The Linux Experiment videos:

• 1: KDE, Ubuntu Gnome
• 2: Fedora Gnome, Others

Yeah, the “Nvidia (GTX 9xx-10xx Series)” should be the correct driver for your GPU. It seems that both desktop and notebook GPUs used the same architecture in this case.

I think the difference is that Bazzite chooses the open source Nvidia kernel driver for the newer GPUs. That one doesn’t support the GTX 900 series, so you’ll get the older proprietary kernel driver.

Upon switching, what should I expect to change?

Many things are very similar on Linux compared to Windows (e.g. Browsing, Steam). One big difference is that people prefer using package managers to install software (instead of downloading and installing it manually).

I’m considering Pop!_OS seeing as its praised for its compatibility and easy switching.

Pop!_OS is a nice distro and it should work well for you if you like the UI. There also many other good distros if you want to play around a bit. You can easily test them using a Live ISO.

What’s the situation with gaming look like? I know gaming on Linux has been a HIGHLY discussed topic for a while, is it easy to play any (non triple-A) steam game? I’m nowhere near involved in computer science, I’d just consider myself more stubborn than most end-users so I can persevere through some basic problems.

I’d say that you can expect almost all games to work. The main exception are games with anti-cheat that decide not to support Linux. In my case, there has only been one game in the last two years that didn’t work (War Thunder crashes a lot more than on Windows). Playing AAA games is generally not an issue. You can check https://www.protondb.com/ for specific games.

Did you do anything special during setup? I couldn’t find many reports specific to this card on ProtonDB, but lots of people were using different Proton versions that weren’t available on Steam so wasn’t sure if that was it.

For me, it defaulted to Proton Experimental. It worked fine so I haven’t changed it. But I can test 9.0 later. At some point I added “–launcher-skip” to skip the launcher, but it was also stable before that.

I’m running the flatpak version of Steam. Maybe you could try switching between the native and flatpak versions of Stream?

I’m also using the default Mint 6.8 kernel. Assuming that you are using the same, you could try switching to the newer HWE kernel.

Honestly, those two already kind-of feel like grasping at straws, but this one is even weirder (I’m only posting it because we both have AMD B650 mainboards): When I first switched to Linux, I noticed that I had a lot more weird crashes than on Windows. Eventually, I got a sufficiently specific error message (dxgi_error_device_reset I think) that led me to a workaround: After I switched the GPU PCIe Gen Mode to Gen4 in the BIOS the crashes were gone. I think the same issue occured on Windows too, but it somehow manages to recover from it. I would be surprised if you have the same issue, but I guess it doesn’t hurt trying.

An easy option to limit the GPU power on Nvidia cards is GreenWithEnvy.

Not sure what else it could be… For me it’s running fine on an RTX 3080 on Mint with the 570 driver… ProtonDB also doesn’t seem to have any relevant reports for the RTX 40 series…