You guys might have talked me into Nobora actually.

I’ve not been someone who’s favored stability over new tech and performance on Windows, so why should I on Linux?

Also, like others have said, changing the Distro if I hate it isn’t exactly the end of the world anyways.

That’s an excellent point.

I run a brand new GPU, I like to play both very old and brand new games. I sometimes overclock my hardware, I’ve been really into modding games in the past.

Stable isn’t really how my gaming ecosystem is on Windows either. Not to mention Windows, Nvidia, AMD etc have always had a element of instability to it. I’ve ran beta updates on my PC for years and also do that on my phone. The amount of times I’v messed around in regedit, cmd, bios, eventviewer etc. is beyond what I can remember. I’ve been adopting windows versions early since Vista came out too.

I’ve never really been happy with stable. Maybe I this question should be «Arch vs Fedora» instead, but I’m not cocky enough(yet) I guess 😂

The kernel doesn’t support Mesa 25 drivers out of the box, so Radeon 9000 cards wouldn’t work properly. No games would run. Also the version of Steam downloaded directly from their website didn’t want to start, no window shows up and it just runs in the background.

Easy fix after a quick Google Qwant search. But someone who doesn’t have at least some deeper experience with either MacOS or Windows wouldn’t know where to start to fix such an issue either.

Other than this it’s been fine.

It did definitely do that for me. Tried that and Pop.

Luckily this community helped me figure it out together with information found searching the web. If I wasn’t persistent and somewhat tech savvy I’d be stuck for sure.

I like this answer!

Nobara is actually one I highly considered. But I keep reading that base Fedora is more stable.

Of that’s not true I love the features Nobara comes with.

This community gave me the best kind of help. Gave me ways to figure out my problem, understand why it was happening and then a solution.

I’m probably buying another SSD to put in my system for an alternative OS. And at this rate I might put Windows on it and main Linux.

Yep.

Issue was found to be Mint or Pop won’t install a Mesa driver new enough to support a 9070 XT.

Fixed that and now pretty much everything works. (That I install on a Linux drive, games on my Windows partitions doesn’t work, but that’s fine)

Thanks for the explanation! Makes choosing a distro all that much easier.

It seems I’ve managed to get Mint to work too, so I’ll test it out some

Looks like that might have worked on Mint.

Gonna test it to see if games will run now

I’m not judging a distro just on how it looks. I do judge the standard interface as I wasn’t aware you could easily change it.

I’m up for a challenge, but I’m skeptical to Arch as it seems like it’s a bit too advanced for someone who’s totally green like myself.

Haven’t tried that in Mint yet, but it didn’t work in Pop. The terminal didn’t give any errors or anything, it just stayed with Mesa 24.

I’ll just try those commands before anything else i Mint and see what it does.

The common consensus I’ve seen is for newbies to the stay away from Arch but maybe I’ll that Garuda one. From the screenshots it looks fantastic.

Mint just looks like strange Windows. Still looks great, but very similar to the interview I’m bored to death with.

I’m gonna give the mint route a go(just did a fresh install) or I’m doing Fedora or something similar.

I’m down to at least give the slightly more advanced stuff a go at least. I can always just reinstall and at least I learn a long the way.

I ran apt update and then apt upgrade. That allowed me the kernel I needed to at least change the resolution and refreshrate. But it seems the Mesa driver I got then and get now is too old for the 9070 XT. Also got a bunch of error of Vulkan missing, so I guess I know why games wouldn’t run now.

I need Mesa 25 and stuck on 24. looking at tutorials for getting the newest mesa driver on Mint 22z. (Did a fresh install)

Yes, used Upgrade, told me nothing was changed or upgraded. Update told me nothing was available.

Did a jump back to Mint again as I found a few parts of it nicer than Pop and was gonna reinstall anyways.

If this doesn’t work. I’m just going to try Fedora.

As of now I’m stuck on Mesa 24 still, but it’s a newer one than I got on Pop. Kernel is set up to 6.11-something right now. Found a guide to get a newer kernel and then Mesa 25 that I’m gonna the later. (Looks like Mesa 25 only works on 6.12 and newer?)

If nothing else, this is actually kind a fun and interesting. But nowhere near where I want it for daily driving outside of browser use. But I guess my GPU is to «blame» for being too new

I disabled that before starting the whole process. But I’ll check if it came back on

Tried that but it’s still on Mesa 24. I’m doing something wrong somewhere but I don’t know what at this point.

Maybe a non-Ubuntu distro would be better for me?

This and Steam starting with Vulkan errors might have figures it out. My OS is running Mesa 24.0.3, which looks to predate my graphics card.

I’ll try a manual update and see how that goes

I’m guessing this is my issue too. I did some searching and the 9000 cards should work fine in Pop OS. So this is indeed strange.

I can’t remember what the commands where actually. Sudo apt something 😂