HDR support is still very much incomplete, Valve is driving that effort and something should be available Soon(tm) maybe later this year or next.
You'll want a rolling release distro of some sort to take advantage of the most recent work on display tech. Check out Arch, Fedora, Nobara, Bazzite, etc - they're all much more current than Pop (which is based on Ubuntu and cuts stable releases every couple of years.) Use Wayland and pipewire to take advantage of the modern display and audio stack and more modern features (VRR, HDR) should "just work" when they're implemented and released.
Multiple displays are always a shit show. Once a year I try out a current distro, and within a week I'm back on Windows. This time was Bazzite, and the exact same problems as always, both Plasma and Gnome, just last week. After all this time windows still don't remember their size and position, and right click context menus randomly break and show up on the opposite monitor. Go and look up the bugs, and I can see they've been a problem for like 5-15 years.
If you give up on Linux for the time being, I HIGHLY recommend looking up Windows Xlite. It is a highly modified Windows 10 or 11 iso. They even have the option to install without Windows Defender, its such a breath of fresh air, almost feels like being back on XP or 7.
I'd never heard of Xlite, that's great. I can imagine what you mean, current stock Windows is always chugging on some unecessary telemetry in the background. Some days I want to buy an old system to put XP on for the nostalgia.
I DEFINITELY shared that worry, but I found it on an invite only forum that has a track record of clean isos and modded OS'es, and any uploaded files are scanned by multiple anti-malware/viruses. Plus I could see the dude FBConan had a long very active history there. He + someone else used to make Phoenix Lite, but other dude wanted to get greedy, so he ditched him and went solo. Now he just takes donations from Patreon, and makes downloading easy from his own website.
I recently bought an AMD card just to not have to deal with Linux NVIDIA nonsense anymore. I know not everyone can be in a situation that allows them to do this. But if you can, and if you don’t want to wait on the hope that all the NVIDIA issues will be resolved when explicit sync finally hits all the distro repos and the NVIDIA driver (it’s going to still take some months), I’d advise going AMD.
I’ve had nothing but buttery smoothness since switching, running Wayland with two displays at different refresh rates, and gaming works phenomenally well with no frame loss that I can tell and no stuttering/tearing.
If you are more patient than I and continue with NVIDIA, I wish you all the luck and hope the trickling in of the various fixes and libraries and drivers happen rapidly.
many linux distributions still use the older method of getting things to appear on screen.
they rely on a program called x11, development on x11 has stopped in favour of a new system called wayland. x11 does not support running different displays at different refresh rates, wayland does.
but nvidia doesn't support wayland very well yet. you can use it, but it might be more prone to crashes when using an nvidia gpu. i still recommend trying it.
usually you will find a menu at one of the corners of the screen before logging in to your desktop. here you will usually find something like "desktop name (xorg)" and "desktop name (wayland)".
but some software hides the wayland option from nvidia users, it shouldn't be too difficult to find a guide on how to make this option appear if it is hidden though.
HDR support is still a work in progress. Afaik it's not part of any official standard for display technology on linux yet, but KDE Plasma 6 has experimental support and Valve is actively working on support.
KDE Plasma 6 is currently only available on distributions that push updates more frequently, without testing said updates thoroughly, like arch linux and some derivatives. the pop os developers have also promised to support HDR in their upcoming desktop environment called cosmic, which might still take a while to be released
You are likely using X11. X11 treats all enabled displays as one "screen" and therefore different refresh rates will have issues (as will VRR for example).
Wayland is the way to go, but the NVIDIA drivers are still buggy with Wayland. Pop!_OS currently uses a desktop environment based on an outdated version of GNOME, so it probably won't be amazing under Wayland.
I'd recommend using a distro with a recent version of KDE Plasma as it has non-experimental support for VRR and great support for Wayland. You'll also want an up-to-date kernel and the latest NVIDIA drivers. I recommend Fedora KDE Spin or openSUSE Tumbleweed. Installing NVIDIA drivers is a little bit more involved (search for "RPM Fusion NVIDIA" for Fedora), but very doable.
I personally switched to an AMD GPU because of the issues with NVIDIA, but NVIDIA support is improving so you'll probably be fine.
Next version of popos will have in house DE with Wayland. Not use if it will support HDR but HDR is coming or Linux over all. Newest KDE has some basic support already?
If you haven't already check ProtonDB for compatibility on your steam library! Anti cheat is usually a no go but some games will work. Non steam games you'll have to check something like Lutris/Heroic for support.
I spent a few months last year running Nobara. I'm back on Windows unfortunately. There are a ton of games that ran just fine, but there's also a lot of little issues. For example, in Grim Dawn I couldn't type in chat, in Pathfinder WotR I simply couldn't get mods to work, STALKER Anomaly simply wouldn't load. Then there was the big issue of my mouse cursor dropping below full screen games. Still there, but not visible. The only fix I could use was to restart the computer.
It's tantalizingly close to ready, and if you don't care about modding it probably already is. For me it just didn't work out, yet.
I had a terrible experience with popOS, manjaro and Garuda. But it was back in 2020. Some of the issues you’ve mentioned and + a few more. I couldn’t use them as my daily driver. I’m using Nvidia. GPU had too many issues and lags. (I’m gonna dual boot to see how it goes).
After watching Chris Titus’s Linux tier video, I’m interested in trying:
Kubuntu
Nobara (sceptical about it)
mint
I like the look of Fedora Plasma KDE (I wonder if you could get that look on the ones I have mentioned)
I'm not sure who this Chris Titus is, but I can't believe there's no mention of Bazzite in that infographic, which is surprising because it's arguably the best distro for gaming right now (and a pretty decent newbie-friendly distro too). It's also surprising there's no mention of CachyOS, which is overall the best performing easy-to-install Linux distro right now (although since it's based on Arch, I wouldn't recommend it for newbies).
So if I were you, I wouldn't put too much faith in their video when they missed out on these two (and several other cool distros such as Bluefin, SecureBlue, AntiX etc).
In saying that, nVidia on Linux sucks in general, so I second @ulkesk's suggestion and recommend getting an AMD instead - it's so much more nicer and hassle-free, not having to deal with any proprietary driver bs, and having a smooth Wayland experience.
I have Nvidia, the actual experience of driver updating and installation on Nobara was seamless, it just has a setup tool that detects the card and downloads the drivers. The same was true for other peripherals, my razer keyboard and mouse were easy to setup, there was a tool for my XBOX controller.
The recommendation to get AMD is reasonable for new builds, but it's also one of those little issues. I'm just not willing to give up my 4080 for a less capable piece of hardware. But again, I didn't have any real issues, even VRR and dual monitors worked fine. Ray tracing was working in Steam games, but I couldn't figure out how to get it running for my GOG games and whatnot. Like I said, it's so close to being ready for daily driving, but not my personal use case.
You will have to use wayland to run monitors at different refresh rates without tearing. You will also need wayland for HDR. It's still not working perfectly yet, but there is a lot of work being put into it.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but if you're using stock Pop_OS it uses xorg by default as the compositor which iirc has issues with multiple monitors on different refresh rates. You can edit your .config file to enable the Wayland compositor and give it a try and see if it works!
I'd like to add that the current Cosmic DE in use is an ageing fork of Gnome and is going to be replaced with a Rust-based DE called Cosmic (Epoch)soon.
I've never had OP's problem, but another avenue I'd consider is to set display settings in the nvidia-settings app, which can be opened with a GUI from the terminal. These settings are separate from those in the normal settings menu, in ways I don't totally understand.
I had an issue with connect and the recent update fixed it for me. By if it’s the same issue I had, try running in Wayland if your using x11. Or go back to x11 if you are in Wayland.
Sorry to hear that. Ubisoft Connect has been hit or miss for me. On my intel machine it works fine, on my nvidia machine the menu was just a black box which failed to or loaded so slowly that it was unusable. My only advice is to use the latest Proton/Wine-GE/Proton-GE and wait for updates from Ubisoft. This is all unofficial so having it work at all is a miracle.
I'm running it the latest Linux Mint running Lutris installed from their official deb file.
I think with the Steam version you would have the same problem. A lot (if not all) of my Ubisoft games in Steam launch the Ubi Launcher and then the game itself. It's a cluster fuck honestly.
A Ubi game every now and then is one of my very few reasons to dual boot (sadly).
OH I didn't know that ubi games worked that way on Steam, well then I guess this means that AC Odissey (and all other ubi games actually) are broken for everyone playing on linux, steam deck included atm?
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