My Experience with Gaming on Linux Using NVidia

When I got my new MSI gaming laptop featuring NVidia’s RTX 5070 Ti as its dedicated GPU, I was worried about how well it would play with Linux. AMD cards are supported really well by the Linux ecosystem, but the state of NVidia support is not always as straightforward. I tentatively dual booted until I found out the answer, and luckily everything went well… eventually.

I first tried PopOS!, seeing that it has placed a big emphasis on NVidia support. It’s true that it ships with proprietary NVidia drivers already installed, but the hybrid mode of handling GPU workload between the RTX card and the integrated Intel one did not seem to work right, causing constant freezes during gameplay. I also experienced frequent audio cut-offs.

I then switched to Mint to see if it would fare better, since Mint is known to be stable and tends to work without much friction out of the box. Unfortunately, I ran into the same problems. I first tried a few different driver versions to no avail, then switched to open-source Nouveau drivers and found that things worked correctly but at a very low, an unplayable level of, performance.

I disabled the integrated card entirely, seeing that the issue is the coordination between the 2 GPUs, and forced NVidia to be used at all times. It did fix all these problems but obviously resulted in my entire desktop experience rendered on that single GPU.

Out of curiosity, I tried Nobara next. It’s a derivative of Fedora by GloriousEggroll, the creator of Proton-GE. I briefly considered Bazzite, too, but decided against it due to its immutability. Nobara, having no such constraint, was the better alternative.

Once I installed Nobara, everything worked perfectly out of the box. No more freezes, proper hybrid mode, audio working right. It could be the more up-to-date kernel version, or maybe the various gaming optimizations it adds to Fedora. Either way, it fit my system much better than the previous distros. I also really like KDE Plasma, the desktop environment it ships with. Feels way more modern than Cinnamon.

Once everything was in place, I looked for alternatives for MSI Center, MSI’s official Windows-only software used to adjust certain hardware features. I was keen on limiting my battery charge at the very least. After a bit of research, I found and installed MControlCenter, an open-source alternative to MSI Center. It had all the features I was looking for, including battery limiter and CPU/GPU temperature display.

With that final piece of the puzzle, my system was complete. I’m happy I distro-hopped a bit to land on Nobara, and am glad to see that in 2025, gaming on Linux with an Nvidia card works so well. Trying out various video games from different eras, I was able to run everything from 90s classics to today’s AAA titles thanks to Wine and Proton. At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if Linux one day becomes the primary platform for PC gaming.