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Comment by geuis | Hacker News Reader

I have a pc I built when the 2080 TI came out. How is Linux support for the supporting drivers for those cards today? The machine is still more than powerful enough for my needs but I haven't used it in a couple years because Windows really is just complete garbage. I'd like to be able to take advantage of new to moderately old hardware without dealing with Windows.

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I've been running a 2080 TI with AMD 5600x on Linux Mint Cinnamon for three months 24/7 with no graphics issues. Previously ran the proprietary nvidia-driver-550 but now use the nouveau open source drivers. There are five choices for Nvida drivers either open source, closed or open kernal (up to 570/580 now). This was a complete switch off Windows 10, which I've only had to boot twice in three months, to transfer some data.

Every game I've tried on Linux was either gold or platinum on ProtonDB and ran fine so far. WINE worked for running a couple non-game apps. Lutris is another way to run programs but I haven't needed it yet.

Definitely try it if you have a machine sitting there. There is so much support for Linux and Mint on the web it was easy to answer any questions I had setting things up.

1070 TI works perfect on Arch for the past ~6 months with latest drivers (better than Debian stable!). This card is old enough that only the closed source drivers are supported, but it seems to work fine.

You will be absolutely fine

If it helps I used to use a gaming laptop for work that had a RTX 2060 mobile version, I was able to run some recent games like Elden Ring (including mods & online play), and some older but still demanding titles like Witcher 3. All of this without tinkering too much on a oob Ubuntu LTS install (I later switched to popOS because I don't like snaps that much).

Someone else recommended PopOSin other comments. I pulled up the page but haven't looked at it extensively. In what ways is it different from a recent Ubuntu LTS install?

The two are very similar in a lot of aspects, they both make it very easy to install proprietary nvidia GPU drivers, they both use Debian as base, and the default desktop for them is Gnome.

In the past I migrated to PopOS mainly due to these two things:

1. I prefer flatpaks/system packages over snap[1], if you run `sudo apt install firefox` you'll get a snap application in Ubuntu, that for me is an anti-pattern from Canonical to force adoption of snaps.

2. I found some weird performance issues with my laptop when I installed Ubuntu, thankfully I managed to find a fix after hours of tinkering[2], but I was surprised I had to do these workarounds in the first place (I've been running linux as my main OS since I was a teenager and never had to do anything similar)

If gaming is your main goal I'd consider using something like Bazzite or CachyOS, these two distros will still serve you if you want to run work/office apps too, they just come preconfigured w/ a lot of gaming goodies (like steam and nvidia drivers oob) but won't get into your way if you plan to install other stuff.

[1] https://snapcraft.io/ [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1973434...

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