I tried Debian, I tried Fedora for my Lenovo Legion 5 Pro RTX3060: Framerate issues, stuttering in browsers, stuttering in simple 3D programs

Bazzite

Check the lenovo legión discord server, there is a linux channel and they can help you better than here probably

I second disabling Nouveau via blacklist, and I'm unsure if there is similar software for Lenovo, but I use asusctl to force the use of the Nvidia card over the integrated Vega graphics. This could very well be an issue with graphics card switching, so it's worth looking into.

As for distro recs, while most would probably recommended Linux Mint for beginners, I prefer to recommend Bazzite. It's Fedora-based, but comes with Nvidia drivers and lots of gaming optimization baked-in.

This could be an issue where the AMD GPU is only being used. I, like some of the others would suggest Linux Mint.

My spouse has a laptop from Asus with VERY similar Specs (but an RTX 3050ti instead of a 3060) and so far Linux Mint has been a pretty trouble -free experience with ONE condition:

I set it to use the dedicated nvidia gpu 24/7 as opposed to the integrated AMD gpu. I forgot what exactly was happening but if memory serves it was disrupting something, I think recovering from closing the lid?

After doing that we’ve never had an issue again. They mostly use at their desk plugged in, sp the power usage isn’t much a concern.

Hope this helps!

Distros are a red herring. I used debian 12 (first gnome, then xfce) for more than a year with no problems, and the current version of Bazzite is also problem-free for me when it comes to nvidia prime (apart from a KDE-specific memory leak). Basically, this should be easily fixable without a fresh install.

I don't know what distro you're on atm, but set up prime-run and try running programs with that. I also recommend going onto the uefi and disabling secure boot. You can get it to work with proprietary nvidia drivers, but it's a bit of a process and unless you really need it you might as well leave it off for now.

Try Ubuntu, it has a user friendly GUI for installing Nvidia and other 3 parts drivers.

That's odd, I remember using Debian 12 without this issue when it was released, I later switched to an Arch based distro (Endeavour OS) to experiment with how it would run games (they ran better, I think some games were freezing on Debian 12 stable).

I can't say anything about Fedora, never used it.

Do you have more information about the specific driver you installed on Debian 12 and Fedora 42? Like the version number? Maybe the neofetch result of your computer specs too.

Sorry for not being able to give more details.

Did you make sure that Nouveau was not loading? If both drivers are on the system, Nouveau usually ends up taking precedence unless it's been blacklisted. Also, if this is a laptop type with a hybrid graphics setup, you may need additional software to manage the handoff between GPUs (optimus, bumblebee, etc.)

Does your laptop have 2 GPU’s?

NVIDIA Optimus sucks for Linux, I would suggest looking into EnvyControl and forcing your xorg & xrandr to use your NVIDIA GPU primarily and not the iGPU.

It's still Fedora under the hood, but Nobara has a pile of graphics tweaks to enable video editing and gaming, by the developer of the Proton layer that Valve uses for Steam. It's optimized for high end graphics and nVidia cards.

It's not your fault because with nvidia gpu you have to add env variables to tell your pc that use nvidia prime, no matter what distro you use you have to configure env varibales, although I'll suggest you openSUSE-Tumbleweed and I was going to suggest you Fedora but you had problems so it's ok.

I have non pro version and I disabled the iGPU in BIOS it worked on ubuntu but battery was nonexistent.

Recently I switched on the iGPU. Now I tried various distros and Arch and Bazzite worked out of the box.

Okay, I had the same problem with a 3060 laptop. The easy answer is : your next distro should be Nobara.

These errors happen because your computer does not use your Nvidia GPU but the AMD one. There is no hardware acceleration.

In Nobara, everything comes preinstalled and preconfigured. I didn't have those problems anymore.

(If you fancy masochism, you can also go the Arch or NixOS way)

Give Linux Mint a spin, I seriously doubt there's a friendlier distribution for newcomers from Windows.

NVIDIA mostly does fine with Wayland now IME. Running KDE Wayland on a Legion Slim 5 with RTX 4060 myself for over a year now, with minimal problems after the NVIDIA 550+ drivers came out.

I did have definite problems, including on X11, with the 535 drivers that the Debian repos were still using at last check. Your best bet is probably to install the latest drivers straight from NVIDIA's repos: https://docs.nvidia.com/datacenter/tesla/driver-installation-guide/index.html

That's what I ended up doing on a Debian-based distro, and it pretty much fixed my issues. There are specific instructions linked there for different supported distros.

My daily driver now is Garuda, which is essentially just Arch with a GUI installer and some extremely handy extra user-friendly tools bolted on. It's aimed at gaming, and so makes it extra easy to get the drivers set up and kept up to date. That is basically why I decided to give their installer a go in the first place after I got this laptop, to at least let it run hardware detection and see how it was configuring things, to tell where I might have been going wrong in my then-main distro. Then I liked the experience enough that I stuck around. It mostly just works.

Note: This would be from someone with experience on Arch. If you're not cool with rolling releases, that may not be a good choice. Garuda does default to a BTRFS/Snapper setup that makes it easy to just boot into a previous snapshot if anything does break, which does come in handy occasionally.

But, as other commenters have already said? The distro itself doesn't really matter. That's mainly just down to personal taste. The important part here is getting the right drivers and configuration going on whatever you do prefer to use. Some distros just make this easier than others

I have a desktop which has / had a similar problem.

Originally I built it with a g-series Ryzen which has integrated Radeon Vega graphics. Upgraded to a 3060 and wanted to run Linux for gaming instead of windows.

I couldn’t get a distro to reliably use my graphics card without the issues you describe. Stuttering, crashing, generally unusable.

Garuda was the answer (to be fair I’d try Bazzite too but I just didn’t get there as Garuda worked). In fact, it worked out of the box for me and I enjoyed it so much I made it my work OS.

I like the GUI utilities they’ve made for front-ending a bunch of Arch CLI utilities and I’ve been saved by BTRFS snapshots more than once.

try installing btop and having a look at the gpu utilisation when you're running stuff

a distribution is just an assortment of packages, it's the same linux + driver underneath. nvidia on linux is a headache. are there people who made it work? sure. is that a worthwhile waste of your time? it is not.

get hardware that's linux supported and you'll have plenty of challenges during the transition, you don't need the additional "self destruction in..." countdown timer booming from the speakers.

if you still wanna have at it, pop_os (however it's spelt), bazzite and nobara are some od the distros that have dedicated nvidia install images and are thusly more likely to work OOB and work better afterwards.