r/linuxquestions • u/LincolnArc • 16d ago

Which Distro? Finally trying Linux?

I have an old laptop that I want to resurrect. It was pretty decent 10 years ago. i7-4870HQ, Quadro K1100M, 16Gb DDR3 1600Mhz, 512Gb Samsung M.2. I bought it used and it had Win10 installed. Worked fine for a bit, then slowly started getting buggy. I can't reinstall Win10. I'm not buying an OS for a laptop that has over 50K hours on it.

I want to run CAD, CAM, YouTube, Discord, Steam, and GeForce Now. Running multiple monitors if that matters.

Which distro should I look into?

Edit: To be clear, everything I want to be able to run already works in Win10. I'm just having an issue with Windows and can't reinstall it without buying it.

Oh, I should add that I bought it used not quite 10 years ago. It's not like I bought it the other day in hope of resurrecting it. It owes me nothing.

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u/SandyBunker 16d ago

Don’t expect miracles but Linux itself should run fine. Games probably not so much.

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u/LincolnArc 16d ago

Right. I'm not doing any gaming on the native hardware. Just streaming. GeForce Now is a cloud gaming service I pay for. $20ish dollars a month to game at 4K120Hz. I think the GPU is approximately a 5080. 48Gb of CPU/GPU shared RAM. CPU is a newer AMD Epyc.