JAdsel

Also early 2000s here, but I was in my late 20s by then. Started out on Debian not that long before Woody came out, then before too long I tried Mandrake alongside it.

Exciting stuff for someone who first set hands (and started into BASIC) on a TRS-80, and then ran GEOS on a C64 for years. I was drawn to the opportunities for more tinkering, among other things.

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’m also in the Nordics (so accustomed to the overall electronics prices by now), and going to echo that their prices are looking kinda steep for what you’re getting. Unless you’re somehow extremely uncomfortable with picking up a refurb machine somewhere else, and installing whichever distro(s) you want on it yourself. That should be a simple enough process, maybe especially dealing with a Lenovo–and really on just about any laptop you can find, as compared to 20 years ago. Or probably even the 10 since you were last using it.

Just getting a refurb elsewhere and making an install USB is the way I would suggest going. If you use Ventoy to write it, you should be able to try several different live system options off the same stick before deciding which to go with for now.

That site did not seem to be actually specifying what distro they’re installing for you, but their “Linux installation” service page (for the equivalent of $150US or €130+!) shows Mint and offers the option of several desktop flavors of Mint, Ubuntu, or Fedora. If you’re happy to pay that kind of premium for someone else to spend maybe 15 minutes on likely a Mint install set up however they decided was best? Sure, it might be a decent way to go. Doesn’t really seem necessary even for a complete beginner, however.

I came in just about as Debian Woody was coming out, in 2002. (Main reason I can even date it beyond “Idk, about 20 years ago?”).

Tried Mandrake a while after that, often recommended as pretty much the equivalent of Linux Mint at the time in terms of noob friendliness. I did enjoy that but stuck with Debian for my main system for years, though.

Very much agreed. I ran into some similar issues for a while on KDE Wayland, also with strange freezes–and was concerned that it might be a (fairly new at the time) hardware issue. No, it was evidently some weirdness involving the then-current NVIDIA drivers, which was thankfully fixed not that long after.

If you do have NVIDIA graphics, you’ll probably want to make sure it’s using the latest drivers from them–and maybe particularly on Wayland. More stable distros do tend to ship older versions.

Primarily Garuda these days. It’s basically Arch with some user-friendly additions. The major reason I tried it on a then-new gaming laptop was the actually really good IME hardware detection and minimal fuss NVIDIA setup using their latest drivers.

I was having enough headaches trying to get graphics actually working properly on the Debian-based distro I had been using, that I said fuck it and tried something that would hopefully get things working for me so that I could at least see that configuration to figure out where I’d been going wrong. Then I liked it enough that I have mostly just stayed there on this machine. (Did finally get things fixed on the other side, though.) But, I was already fine with Arch, which probably helps.

I was in a somewhat similar place when I first got a laptop with Windows 11 preinstalled. Decided to dual boot, set Windows up with strictly local accounts, and actually poke around in there out of curiosity.

Tbf, the last time I was regularly doing anything in Windows was during the Vista --> Win 7 era. This did not make 11 any more approachable or easier to get even very basic things accomplished. I didn’t like the UI (still don’t), and kept getting frustrated at those “little” things like the Bluetooth codec issue you mention. Haven’t even tried to do much gaming on that side, to compare, other than a couple I couldn’t get working properly through WINE/Proton. (A couple of other software packages too.) So I ended up rarely playing those, and only booting into there at all once in a blue moon.

I did recognize that a lot of that frustration was on me and my expectations, though. Doesn’t mean that I still don’t want to have more control over basically everything about my system. I probably could make even modern Windows work better for me, but why bother when I’m already happy enough elsewhere. ¯\(ツ)/¯

Same here. I started out on Debian Woody, then decided to try a side install of Mandrake specifically because it was supposed to be the most user-friendly option. I do recall liking the Mandrake experience well enough at the time–but stayed primarily using Debian, because I’m stubborn and rather enjoyed the sense of challenge.

(Also kinda setting the continuing pattern of keeping at least one side distro or OS going to try out. These days, they are more likely to live in VMs though.)

Gotta say, you have a point. Too lost in the privacy sauce to really notice it earlier. ;)

I have found Mozilla’s sync across devices handy, but now I’m in the process of moving over to using Vanadium on my GrapheneOS phone and FireDragon on desktop.

FireDragon started out as a Librewolf fork, but is more recently based on Floorp. They are still keeping in sync with Librewolf’s privacy enhancements, with some of their own thrown in. I like that the default search engine is Garuda’s instance of Searx, with Whoogle as another option if you don’t want to self host. FireDragon will also sync your Firefox account off Garuda’s server instance if you like (which would be more useful if I weren’t going with a Chromium fork on mobile). The Garuda project is certainly looking more trustworthy than Mozilla these days.

You might want to look into Snapper: https://documentation.suse.com/smart/systems-management/html/snapper-basic-concepts/index.html

Booting from snapshots has pulled my chestnuts out of the fire a few times–between using a rolling release distro as my daily driver, and NVIDIA graphics not always behaving well in conjunction with that.

If you install the Linux bootloader on the other drive with Linux, Windows basically just doesn’t know or care that the it exists to bother writing over it. You can use UEFI to choose what to boot, but GRUB works fine with entries across different drives.

That said, it’s not actually that hard to fix with a live USB if Windows does decide to eat GRUB on the same drive. I’ve been taking my chances on laptops particularly for years. So far, the only real problem I’ve run into was doing something stupid while dead tired and managing to nuke the Windows bootloader all on my own–somewhat ironically, while I was setting up another Linux distro to boot off a new drive! Which was also totally fixable, but a bigger pain than reinstalling GRUB would have been. (Especially with not being nearly as comfortable dealing with Windows stuff.)

Does it work if you launch steam through mangohud? Like:

mangohud steam-native

You would probably want to temporarily remove the per-game launch command while running it that way, for the HUD to actually show up in game (assuming it will load). But that’s another approach to try, at least for troubleshooting purposes.