I’m looking for a distro that will be able to get the most out of my graphics on an MSI Katana laptop.
Right now I have Debian Bookworm running the Nvidia binary driver, and the graphics lags a bit compared to when this laptop had Windows 11 on it.
I’m playing Final Fantasy XIV, and doing web browsing on it.
I’d like to stay with something Debian based and running Gnome. Ubuntu is not ideal because I have trust issues with Canonical since the Amazon ad debacle back in the late 00s.
Can y’all give suggestions for a distribution that might work better, or some tweaks that might optimize the performance on Debian?
Should I just wait for Trixie and see if that give better performance?
I’m just spitballing for ideas here. Thanks in advance for any advice.
In my opinion, go with Ubuntu. First, any issues you have with Ubuntu can be fixed easily; snaps can be easily removed, as well as amazon links, gnome tweaks and the rest. Second, unlike Debian, Ubuntu has the hardware enablement stack, which means that any supported Ubuntu release will run on hardware newer than that release, and your graphics card should run with a much newer driver. Any gaming distros built on Ubuntu are probably fine, but will only give marginal improvement to FPS.
My issue is that I don’t trust Canonical. I was an Ubuntu user when they sold our searches to Amazon, and I am generally distrusting of corporations.
I understand it completely. However, my point of view is that, even in the case of the Amazon searches, it was easily disableable. I prefer Ubuntu flavors over base Ubuntu, which are run by the community and only do the bare minimum for Canonical to approve them as flavors (like add firefox as a snap). All of that bare minimum work can be easily undone in my opinion. Though, I understand avoiding Canonical when possible.