Hello,
I’m speccing out a Framework 16 to be my Linux gaming rig. I’m planning on running Bazzite, but open to other distro recs if they work better/are more up-to-date/etc.
I kinda want the Nvidia RTX5070 because it’s the faster GPU specs-wise, but historically Nvidia has been… Not awesome, shall we say, in the Linux stability department.
So, I’d like to know people’s experiences. If you’re running Linux on a 5070-loaded 16 right now, how is it? Which distro did you choose, and did you run into any issues I should be aware of?
… That said, I will be waiting until after the Next-Gen Event since they might announce something of interest.
Depends, for simplicity Bazzite is your best option. I went with Arch and it has been a lot of tinkering and hit and miss getting it to work. I did end up trying Bazzite briefly to verify it was a configuration issue not a hardware issue. I haven’t used mine for a lot of gaming yet but what little I have used it for it has handled well.
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My experience with Nvidia under Linux has been consistently poor. If you want to use Linux and don’t have any problems, go for the RX 7700. It might be a bit slower, but it generally works “out of the box.”
If you absolutely prefer the Nvidia card, then install Windows. I ran Linux with Nvidia cards for over 10 years and always had problems. Under Linux, you also have the option of using LACT to increase the power limit to 120 watts for the AMD card. I can’t say whether that works with the 5070.
I use my Framework 16 with the 7700S under Manjaro; it’s absolutely fantastic.
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That over-powering mechanism might actually be a godsend for increasing performance. I figured out a way to get my FW12 to supply 20W to the CPU+iGPU instead of the default 15W and the difference is night and day–maybe the same will be true on the RX 7700S.
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Using Bazzite will help with some of the headache of trying to keep the Nvidia card playing nicely cause of how updates are rolled out. But I agree, Nvidia and Linux still don’t mix very well and things will break with updates. That said AMD isn’t bug free from what I’ve seen they had a bad update that caused some issues too. If you insist on Linux and Nvidia, Bazzite is your best option, Otherwise I too would suggest Windows, specially if it is going to be your main PC. On the performance side of things, the 5070 is a decent enough boost over the 7700s for performance.
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I insist on Linux (Been using that for 10+ years, not about to stop now) but I don’t insist on Nvidia. Just trying to get the lay of the land because it has been a hot minute since I’ve owned any non-dedicated-game-console with a dGPU at all.
My wife got a FW16 with the 5070 and it’s been great so far. She mainly uses the GPU for ML stuff on the Linux side (Debian), so we haven’t tried using the GPU to drive the desktop or anything (I asked if she wanted to do that). On the Windows side, she mainly uses the GPU for games and Windows is easy to configure that way.
Basically, it depends on what you’re using the GPU for. If it’s for full-desktop stuff, then I don’t have an answer for you for this specific GPU (one of my previous laptops had an Nvidia and it was…meh, but that was before Wayland and when we had to manually mess around with xorg.conf and stuff like that…Wayland has its share of problems, but I do not miss xorg.conf 
).
Oh, one more thing: Even Debian sid didn’t have a new-enough version of the Nvidia driver, but Nvidia provides an apt repo, which has made so many things much easier. We set that up and it’s been great.
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Well I can tell you that the little research I did before getting a framework 16 specifically had me wait till they released a Nvidia option because the performance per watt was so much better on Nvidia. AMD is behind, probably why you see almost no laptops releasing with dedicated AMD GPUs.
I am curious if AMD will announce a mobile 90’s series card or cards, but with the current state of AI demand they are probably in no rush.
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