[ludamn]

If it helps I used to use a gaming laptop for work that had a RTX 2060 mobile version, I was able to run some recent games like Elden Ring (including mods & online play), and some older but still demanding titles like Witcher 3. All of this without tinkering too much on a oob Ubuntu LTS install (I later switched to popOS because I don't like snaps that much).

[geuis]

Someone else recommended PopOSin other comments. I pulled up the page but haven't looked at it extensively. In what ways is it different from a recent Ubuntu LTS install?

[ludamn]

The two are very similar in a lot of aspects, they both make it very easy to install proprietary nvidia GPU drivers, they both use Debian as base, and the default desktop for them is Gnome.

In the past I migrated to PopOS mainly due to these two things:

1. I prefer flatpaks/system packages over snap[1], if you run `sudo apt install firefox` you'll get a snap application in Ubuntu, that for me is an anti-pattern from Canonical to force adoption of snaps.

2. I found some weird performance issues with my laptop when I installed Ubuntu, thankfully I managed to find a fix after hours of tinkering[2], but I was surprised I had to do these workarounds in the first place (I've been running linux as my main OS since I was a teenager and never had to do anything similar)

If gaming is your main goal I'd consider using something like Bazzite or CachyOS, these two distros will still serve you if you want to run work/office apps too, they just come preconfigured w/ a lot of gaming goodies (like steam and nvidia drivers oob) but won't get into your way if you plan to install other stuff.

[1] https://snapcraft.io/ [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1973434...