NVIDIA mostly does fine with Wayland now IME. Running KDE Wayland on a Legion Slim 5 with RTX 4060 myself for over a year now, with minimal problems after the NVIDIA 550+ drivers came out.

I did have definite problems, including on X11, with the 535 drivers that the Debian repos were still using at last check. Your best bet is probably to install the latest drivers straight from NVIDIA’s repos: https://docs.nvidia.com/datacenter/tesla/driver-installation-guide/index.html

That’s what I ended up doing on a Debian-based distro, and it pretty much fixed my issues. There are specific instructions linked there for different supported distros.

My daily driver now is Garuda, which is essentially just Arch with a GUI installer and some extremely handy extra user-friendly tools bolted on. It’s aimed at gaming, and so makes it extra easy to get the drivers set up and kept up to date. That is basically why I decided to give their installer a go in the first place after I got this laptop, to at least let it run hardware detection and see how it was configuring things, to tell where I might have been going wrong in my then-main distro. Then I liked the experience enough that I stuck around. It mostly just works.

Note: This would be from someone with experience on Arch. If you’re not cool with rolling releases, that may not be a good choice. Garuda does default to a BTRFS/Snapper setup that makes it easy to just boot into a previous snapshot if anything does break, which does come in handy occasionally.

But, as other commenters have already said? The distro itself doesn’t really matter. That’s mainly just down to personal taste. The important part here is getting the right drivers and configuration going on whatever you do prefer to use. Some distros just make this easier than others

It’s still Fedora under the hood, but Nobara has a pile of graphics tweaks to enable video editing and gaming, by the developer of the Proton layer that Valve uses for Steam. It’s optimized for high end graphics and nVidia cards.

Distros are a red herring. I used debian 12 (first gnome, then xfce) for more than a year with no problems, and the current version of Bazzite is also problem-free for me when it comes to nvidia prime (apart from a KDE-specific memory leak). Basically, this should be easily fixable without a fresh install.

I don’t know what distro you’re on atm, but set up prime-run and try running programs with that. I also recommend going onto the uefi and disabling secure boot. You can get it to work with proprietary nvidia drivers, but it’s a bit of a process and unless you really need it you might as well leave it off for now.

I have non pro version and I disabled the iGPU in BIOS it worked on ubuntu but battery was nonexistent.

Recently I switched on the iGPU. Now I tried various distros and Arch and Bazzite worked out of the box.

It’s not your fault because with nvidia gpu you have to add env variables to tell your pc that use nvidia prime, no matter what distro you use you have to configure env varibales, although I’ll suggest you openSUSE-Tumbleweed and I was going to suggest you Fedora but you had problems so it’s ok.

Like others suggested here, the problem is probably nouveau and you might want to try a gaming-oriented distro which usually configure these things correctly out-of-the-box. My favourite is Nobara and Fedora (which didn’t work for you but works for me because I have different hardware). People suggest Bazzite, but I cannot recommend it because it’s based on Fedora Atomic, and I don’t get along with Fedora Atomic.

As a general admittedly non-helpful suggestion, don’t get Nvidia hardware if you want to use Linux.

a distribution is just an assortment of packages, it’s the same linux + driver underneath. nvidia on linux is a headache. are there people who made it work? sure. is that a worthwhile waste of your time? it is not.

get hardware that’s linux supported and you’ll have plenty of challenges during the transition, you don’t need the additional “self destruction in…” countdown timer booming from the speakers.

if you still wanna have at it, pop_os (however it’s spelt), bazzite and nobara are some od the distros that have dedicated nvidia install images and are thusly more likely to work OOB and work better afterwards.

Does your laptop have 2 GPU’s?

NVIDIA Optimus sucks for Linux, I would suggest looking into EnvyControl and forcing your xorg & xrandr to use your NVIDIA GPU primarily and not the iGPU.

My choice is Arch Linux purely because it’s bleeding edge

I’ve no idea if Arch actually has newer drivers than Debian / Fedora, but if they are you’ll (usually) get better support from the developers of whatever application / package - or in your case - drivers that you’re facing.

It’s more involved than “just” installing Debian, etc… but reading through the Arch Linux wiki as you install will (should) ensure you’ve got the correct drivers setup and you’ll know why they’re working.

So… it’ll be more effort, but you might get “better” results.

nvidia stutters on linux for me too and there was nothing i could do to fix. its better on x11.

ive also seen plenty of weird issues on nvidia laptops with switchable graphics.

please tell me if you ever find a solution.

Bazzite

I second disabling Nouveau via blacklist, and I’m unsure if there is similar software for Lenovo, but I use asusctl to force the use of the Nvidia card over the integrated Vega graphics. This could very well be an issue with graphics card switching, so it’s worth looking into.

As for distro recs, while most would probably recommended Linux Mint for beginners, I prefer to recommend Bazzite. It’s Fedora-based, but comes with Nvidia drivers and lots of gaming optimization baked-in.

Check the lenovo legión discord server, there is a linux channel and they can help you better than here probably

This could be an issue where the AMD GPU is only being used. I, like some of the others would suggest Linux Mint.

Try Ubuntu, it has a user friendly GUI for installing Nvidia and other 3 parts drivers.