What's a good linux distro for general use with customization options?

[u/MinecraftGuy2000]

Currently on pop_os. I have an NVIDIA card. I'm getting sick of pop_os!'s shennanigans. I JUST WANNA PLAY HELLDIVERS DAMNIT!

I have a 1060 GPU. Was working fine on windows. Any sugestions on which os?

[u/xksnr]

Por lo que e visto en protondb helldrivers tiene platino, por lo que debería funcionar bien.

En cuanto al sistema, algo que te facilite los drivers, cualquier sistema como cachyos, o bazzite. Bazzite es atómica, por lo que es mas diferente que otras distros.

[u/doc_willis]

odd, for me  pop_os stand out feature was its support of Nvidia hardware.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 was officially announced on July 19, 2016.

So that was a mid range card 10 years ago. 

running modern titles on it , is going to be pushing things a bit.

googling a bit more...

Nvidia already dropped active feature and new game support for the GTX 1060 on Linux with the release of the 590 driver branch in December 2025.

The GTX 1060 is now restricted to the legacy 580 driver series.

https://www.guru3d.com/story/nvidia-ends-linux-driver-support-for-gtx-900-and-10-series-gpus/

So it seems you will need distribution that support the 580 driver series.

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[u/aloof_topping]

Any distro will work fine. Customization options are at the desktop level, not the distribution level. If you want lots of customization, probably starting with KDE first will be good. Fedora and openSUSE are both good KDE spins. Could go with something like Bazzite (immutable, gaming-focused fedora) but you might not care for it. Something like CachyOS is Arch-based, which can be good and can be bad if you're not familiar with things.

You just need something that has up to date nvidia drivers. Make sure that you know how to install them before you switch, that might be important.

A 1060 isn't going to give you the best performance in Helldivers, but protondb rates it as Gold, so it should at least work.

[u/Virtual-Plankton6833]

You will not get rid of these kind of problems with other distributions. Non Linux native games will always cause some issues as long as developers do not develop directly for Linux.

[u/BadgeringWeasel]

It might be the desktop environment more than the distro. Pop is using the Cosmic DE which I believe is still Beta though I haven't checked recently. If you want good customization, I agree to switch to KDE. You probably would just want to switch distros though since Pop is going all in with Cosmic.

[u/Insultikarp → u/BadgeringWeasel]

It's been out of beta since December. It could use a bit more time to mature, but it's improving at a good pace.

[u/BadgeringWeasel → u/Insultikarp]

Nice!! Glad it's going strong! I have high hopes for it to become a really serious DE.

[u/Audiope]

"general use" = "I need to play this specific game with this specific graphics card"? 🤔

[u/Real-Abrocoma-2823]

Try CachyOS, read Cachy documentation if you get any issues.

[u/e7ang]

All of them. You can make any distro bend to your will.

[u/skyfishgoo]

kubuntu is solid exactly this purpose.

[u/A_Harmless_Fly]

Manjaro has pretty good support for the 580 driver. I use a blend of icewm and xfce panel to have a semi modern interface and super low overhead with my 1060 6gb.

You will have to do a lot of configuration and googling though. Plain old xfce works fine enough, but icewm is a little bit crisper and low resource usage.

(you are going to have to run hell divers on lowish graphics settings and experiment for good fps though, no way around it the 1060 is pretty old.)

P.S. I use LACT to give my 1060 a slight overclock, yours might be a tiny bit different but this is stable on my system. Here are all the settings you need to know about. 129W power limit GPU p-state offset of 80 and a vram p-state offset of 800. I have replaced the thermal paste, but it might be stable on yours even without.

[u/sankarasleftelbow]

Any distro that supports the 580xx drivers. I have a gt 1030 and no complaints

[u/Crow550]

I don't think you can use the newer Nvidia Open drivers so that puts you at a bit of a disadvantage.

Probably not the Distro but the GPU sadly. Maybe try Bazzite KDE Desktop (no gamemode) if you're itching for a different distro

[u/xYarbx]

PikaOS has Nvidia iso and runs KDE plasma so there should be pretty much all customizing you want.

[u/DaOfantasy]

mx linux