this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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I’d suggest trying a gaming focused distribution. I’m running Ubuntu on my machine. Now using Nvidia but previously with AMD and used the Nvidia for VFIO (passing through the GPU to a virtual machine). I’ve had a lot of trouble switching to Nvidia with my current install, especially Snap apps like Firefox and electron apps like VS Code. Snap apps are sandboxed and don’t get appropriate permissions for GPU acceleration. Firefox decodes video on CPU for example.
I did try several distributions when I had the AMD Radeon as primary GPU and overall had good success passing through Nvidia card to the VM. I tried Ubuntu (2023.10 I think?), Debian, Fedora, and Bazzite.
Debian doesn’t have snaps unless you want them and seemed to work Ok. Bazzite and Fedora both worked well.
The main difference it seemed was using Flatpak. You can install a flatpak GPU driver for your Nvidia card and then all the problems go away. Flatpak steam games get to run at full frame rates whereas you’d need AMD for snap.
Also it seemed like some problems were caused by Gnome, issues that are supposed to go away in the future but are nasty now. The gnome Videos/Totem app totally fails on Ubuntu 24.04/wayland/nvidia. It’s possible to get it to work but it’s so much trouble that I wouldn’t recommend it.
KDE Plasma didn’t seem to have these issues. There are things I don’t like about KDE but overall it seemed to work better. It even has dumb features like controlling the brightness of your monitor when connected via USB, a nice feature that even MacOS required a third party app to match.
Everyone has a strong opinion on the subject but if you don’t have a specific need, I’d try Bazzite next. You already know it will work with Nvidia because of the gaming focus. It has KDE so you avoid some Gnome issues. Browsers are the default app of any OS so you know the game/steam expectation means the browser should work as well.
Good luck and please update us with what you figure out!