Hello,
I bought a razer blade 15 laptop a while ago, and world like to install Linux on it, mostly to play games. So, ideally I’d like a distro that can make the most use of the hardware and let me play the most games, while being the easiest to use and lowest maintenance possible. Any recommendation?
I have a Razer Blade Stealth 13 QHD+ touchscreen (RZ09-02393E32) since 2017. Until recently it was mostly Windows and Ubuntu side by side. I realized few months ago I never ever boot on Windows so I removed it. I also got tired on Ubuntu pushing for its own package management system which I don’t find useful. Consequently back to “just” Debian stable and works great for me. Didn’t have to tinker with anything, just works.
Is it easy to get NVIDA drivers, Vulkan, Cuda etc in Debian? I somehow thought that was kind finicky, not sure why …
Generally hardware compatibility should be identical across all distros, as most drivers are baked into the kernel
The exception being Nvidia drivers, you have to install those yourself pretty much everywhere
Lowest maintenance possible is probably gonna be bazzite as people are saying
None.
I had a Razer laptop in the past when they were talking about being dev laptop forward & supporting Linux.
This never happened. Instead flashing Linux voids the warranty now, support drops you, & firmware upgrades only happen thru a green-accented genuine Microsoft Windows GUI installation (no *.bin flashing, no CLI FreeDOS support, no Windows PE).
flashing Linux
I’m a bit confused here… aren’t we talking about a laptop? Why is flashing anything required? Doesn’t the BIOS let one boot on any peripheral, e.g. disk, USB stick, etc and thus allowing one to install Linux (or just boot on live USB stick to test) without flashing?
To upgrade the UEFI or other hardware-level firmware you need a way to upgrade. Best OEMs use LFVS; good OEMs use have ISOs or bin files you can flash from UEFI; terrible OEMs lock that into a Windows-only executable.
In my case there was a fan & thermal update I was never able to get.
I have a Razer blade 15 advanced from a few years ago. I’ve run Arch on it, and now NixOS
It does steam fine, I can use the GPU for gaming, all that fun stuff.
You may want to look into something like Bazzite or Nobara.
Generally though, most distros will be perfectly fine for gaming – just note that some distros will need a little bit of extra work done for stuff like nvidia drivers, so if you’re new to linux, something like those above, which have that done already, will likely be best. Bazzite in particular should be very low maintenance.
My gaming rig has been running Nobara for years now, it’s built off of Fedora by the developer who does the glorious eggroll version of Proton.
It’s got multiple desktop environment versions and is optimized for Linux gaming. It has a bunch of gaming-specific kernel patches and optimizations. Extra drivers pre-installed for controllers and Nvidia GPUs, etc.
It has a very easy update wizard, I run it once every few weeks, works awesome.
Maybe Garuda ?
I’ve used a Razer Blade 16 last year and could never get the speakers to work no matter what I tried. Tested quite a few distros (Mint, Manjaro, Debian) and ultimately settled on Fedora. Didn’t mind the speakers not working much since I used Bluetooth speakers/headphones mostly anyway. Other then that Fedora worked prefectly.
I never owned this model but the ArchLinux wiki confirms that it’s supported, while “it is known to have very limited bios feature and limited Linux stability”.
Can confirm that the Razer BIOS is absolutely bar bones. Never really minded that and as I said aside of the non-working speakers (apparently a known problem with Razer) it was all good.
Normal distros
- Pop!_OS
- Mint
- Fedora
- Ubuntu
Gaming distros
- Garuda
- Bazzite
- Nobara
…or any other distro really. I’ve been gaming on vanilla arch linux. It’s pretty stable and low maintenance once you’re done setting it up and don’t tinker much and have backups with something like Timeshift in place. archinstall script makes it really easy to install vanilla arch linux with everything essential configured.