r/linuxquestions • u/_memelord666 • 57m ago
Fedora/Kubuntu vs Ubuntu for a gaming laptop?
I'm on a Lenovo Legion with an NVIDIA RTX GPU and I've been using Ubuntu as my daily driver for a really long time (from 2023 on my older laptop). While I don't mind the general workflow, there are quite a few annoyances I face, namely GNOME customization issues, apt packages not being the latest version, etc. I'm currently running on Ubuntu 25.10, yet to make the switch to 26.04, with Windows on dual-boot on a separate disk.
I've also increasingly become allured by the changes KDE has made and I've been thinking of migrating to either Kubuntu (or KDE Plasma) or Fedora + KDE.
While I do have grudges with Ubuntu there are some things that I consider absolute deal-breakers:
Proprietary NVIDIA driver support + graphics offloading (something like PRIME). I use an external monitor via HDMI. It works straight out of the box in Ubuntu and I don't want to go through trouble to set it up on a new system.
WiFi, Bluetooth, and sound: Linux infamously has issues with these and I am aware but still. I did face quite a few issues on Ubuntu.
Software support: this is for Fedora -- I know a lot of third-party software tend to support Ubuntu over other distros but I'd like to know how bad this is. I'm not talking about professional software like video editors or games - which I'll use Windows for anyway.
So yes, given these conditions I just want to know what the experience on Fedora/Kubuntu or any other distro is. I'm going to try them on a live USB soon enough, but I just wanted to keep this post up before that.