Something interesting I've noticed is that there is a big difference in usability between desktops and laptops. Desktops I have far less issues. But laptops I have to get lucky to be able to use my HDMI port. And good luck doing that and having cuda support.
Out of curiosity, what laptop models + distros have you tried to set up?
On Acer Nitro 5 with Nvidia GTX-1060Ti and i5, stock Ubuntu 20.04 loaded no problems, and even DisplayLink driver for dual monitor, one through regular HDMI + other through USB -> HDMI adapter worked (though I couldn't get it to rotate display vertically).
The bugs I did have were with it constantly re-disovering network printers that I had to disable, and changing the default wifi power-saving settings because something was funky with it.
On Asus TUF A15 with Nvidia RTX-2060/AMD Renoir + AMD Ryzen 7 4800h absolutely no distro worked out-of-the-box and I needed mainline kernel + latest Nvidia drivers. But after fixing that myself Pop_OS picks up everything perfectly and no problems.
Both of them have CUDA working IIRC (at least running "nvidia-smi" says it does).
I have an inspiron with a 1060Q and had similar problems on an HP envy (forgot the card in there). I've tried a bunch of distros (I've been on linux for about a decade and mainly run Arch though).
I have heard great things about Pop and I am going to be building a new machine with these new cards and giving pop a try.
> except more driver patches and performance tweaks
Honestly, to me that's not a big sell lol. And probably not to the type of people that like distros like Arch. We just want nivida to work like AMD and mesa drivers do. (Having done some testing, I am able to squeeze more performance out of a distro that builds up, such as Arch, vs a distro that you take down, like Ubuntu).
This is right. I am running Pop OS, but will make the jump to Arch when I have time. I don't want to wait for the distro maintainers to release new kernels/language versions/etc. And once you start changing those things, the benefit of the distro starts to fade away.
A nice middle ground is Manjaro (there's a nice GUI to select your kernel). Though I'm not sure what nvidia settings Pop uses, because I still have the above issues with Manjaro. But this may again be laptop centric.
I've used Manjaro on two legacy laptops and a fairly recent desktop and I can only vote for it for almost anything you would want to do with your machine. It's a very lightweight and well-supported distro that has outperformed machines that are on paper twice the speed of the one it's installed on.
Not sure how easy it is to actually game on it though, haven't tried yet. For everything else however, Manjaro is an extremely solid choice, with a very recent kernel too.
