I’m a long-time Linux user but for the past few years my main laptop - a Lenovo Legion 5 with both AMD iGPU and Nvidia dGPU - has been on Win10. I’d like to upgrade and am looking for suggestions for distros and configurations. I’ve mainly used Debian-based distros in the past but am not particular. Here are my main concerns:

  • I will likely still need to run Windows in a VM for a few corporate applications that won’t run in Linux (according to some teammates who have tried).
  • I do a lot of work in Figma and haven’t tried it at all in Linux, but I know for sure it needs GPU acceleration. It seems like I’d have to choose between the following:
    • just running in a browser window and (somehow) assigning the dGPU to that browser
    • the above, but using the unofficial Linux electron-based figma app
    • try running the Windows app in Linux
    • putting Linux on the iGPU and passing the dGPU through to a Windows VM for this
  • I also do a fair amount of local LLM work. I would prefer to do this in Linux with the dGPU, but again I could pass the dGPU through to a Windows VPN and then do it in WSL2 in Windows (which seems a little janky)
  • I don’t want to dual-boot

Does anyone have any thoughts/suggestions on this? I haven’t tried GPU-switching in Linux for a long time and had poor success in the past. Am I better off leaving both GPUs accessible in Linux, or passing one through for the Windows VM?

  • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
    1·
    23 hours ago

    I’ll admit to having no opinion on windowing systems.

    If the distro ships with X, I use X, and if it ships with Wayland, I use Wayland.

    I’d honestly probably not be able tell you which systems I’ve been using use one or the other, and that’s a good thing: if you can’t tell, then it probably doesn’t matter anymore.