Not sure what distro you’re using but try the liquirox kernel. I did that one time on a really stubborn laptop and managed to get both the HDMI and the suspend feature working.

Using mainline or something to ensure I’m up to date on the latest kernel has never solved a single issue in my entire history of trying but using liquirox worked one time.

I always get screwed pretty hard with Debian drivers. Just the other day I updated my Debian server to Debian 12 and then it refused to allow my atheros 9k PCI wifi card to work unless I rebooted after a cold boot. After an entire afternoon, I got to where it wouldn’t work after a cold boot or after a reboot. I literally had to choose between buying a new wifi card or reinstalling Debian/a different distro.

I used to only use Debian for non-laptops but from now on I don’t think I’ll install any new Debian installations on anything.

Dang I thought proton was older than that. I remember playing No Man’s Sky on Linux around the time it was released on pc. I don’t remember running a pirated copy of NMS just so I could make it run on wine but maybe I was. (you used to have to do that whether you owned the game or not if you wanted to play on Linux).

Usually, I do the simplest thing: all the stuff goes on one big ext4 partition. I don’t make a separate partition for /home. I’ll make a swap partition if I can remember but I’ve forgotten to do that before and nothing bad happened. The bootloader goes on a fat32 /boot/efi on the same drive as whatever the Linux install is on. This way I can swap around the drive to different pcs if I have to or easily change/upgrade drives without having to reinstall all my stuff.

This strategy works for dual booting Windows also. I’ll put the windows install all on its own separate drive so it won’t try to erase grub during a disk check or something. That happened one time. Also, by putting Windows and Linux on separate drives you can use the bios to boot between Windows or Linux if you mess up one of the bootloaders.

You can still run Gentoo on a 486. I don’t recommend it.

I doubt my experience was the same as everyone else but I tried to install Debian on my gaming pc a week ago and I could not get Nvidia drivers to work for anything, there were no relevant search results and no one on any message board had any ideas. I gave up and installed Arch and Nvidia drivers without making any hardware changes and it was so unexpectedly easy I still can’t believe it.

I use Debian on my server so I was shocked that it was basically impossible to get Nvidia drivers working, at least on my chipset.

I’m a long time Linux user but I’m really lazy. I recently installed Arch to try it out again as last time I did it was maybe 2012. Personally, manually setting up the hard drive partitions on initial install is just annoying enough to be too much work (I have a lot of drives) but luckily there’s an installer that does that part for you. Everything else you have to do is sensible and easy and actually ends up being less work in the long run. The wiki is also extremely informative, helpful and correct.

Arch probably can be a beginner distro just because if you have a problem it’s so much easier to find out how to fix it on the internet thanks to the wiki and the forums. Something as mundane as installing nvidia drivers in Debian can be a massive ordeal and the minimum required skill level to fix it yourself if it doesn’t work on the first attempt is very high.