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.

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

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 gomes 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 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.

My spouse has a laptop from Asus with VERY similar Specs (but an RTX 3050ti instead of a 3060) and so far Linux Mint has been a pretty trouble -free experience with ONE condition:

I set it to use the dedicated nvidia gpu 24/7 as opposed to the integrated AMD gpu. I forgot what exactly was happening but if memory serves it was disrupting something, I think recovering from closing the lid?

After doing that we’ve never had an issue again. They mostly use at their desk plugged in, sp the power usage isn’t much a concern.

Hope this helps!

That’s odd, I remember using Debian 12 without this issue when it was released, I later switched to an Arch based distro (Endeavour OS) to experiment with how it would run games (they ran better, I think some games were freezing on Debian 12 stable).

I can’t say anything about Fedora, never used it.

Do you have more information about the specific driver you installed on Debian 12 and Fedora 42? Like the version number? Maybe the neofetch result of your computer specs too.

Sorry for not being able to give more details.

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.

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.

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

Give Linux Mint a spin, I seriously doubt there’s a friendlier distribution for newcomers from Windows.

I don’t have experience with dual GPU laptops but from what I’ve heard PopOS handles them really well. They also have an image with the nvidia drivers preinstalled which should make the setup process straightforward

Edit: I also found this github repo which documents some fixes for issues on that device specifically. Not sure how many of these have been patched upstream by now but it’s worth checking out.

Bazzite

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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.