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Fedora Proart Tips

I’ve been a Linux user for a long time, and historically my comfort zone has been “hands-on” distributions: Slackware, Gentoo, Debian, Arch Linux.

I also virtualize heavily. I started back in the day with OpenVZ, then moved to VMware Workstation… until I got fed up with the constant “you must patch your kernel” routine to keep things working smoothly.

Recently I got an Asus ProArt P16 (AMD Ryzen 9 + NVIDIA GPU). Great machine—until I tried to install my usual favorite Linux distributions.

To my surprise, none of them handled the hardware properly (or at least not enough to reliably use the laptop day-to-day). I then tried Fedora 43, and it immediately handled the basics out of the box — the minimum needed to actually use the system.

After a bit more digging, I realized I needed to explicitly enable the NVIDIA dGPU. The fix was simple once you know it:

supergfxctl --mode Hybrid

Then came the “random Google search” moment: I searched for a Fedora derivative that would handle the Asus ProArt P16 well, and the recommendation that kept appearing was Bazzite — which I had never even heard of.

So I installed Bazzite… and honestly, it was a pleasant surprise:

  • Everything hardware-wise worked out of the box
  • The only thing not perfectly supported (for now) is the touchpad corner slide gesture to enable the touchpad bezel — which I can live with

The biggest change for me: Bazzite is an OSTree-based system, so it forced me to learn a different way of managing the OS. It feels like starting from zero compared to the classic “mutable distro” workflow.

But here’s the part that really matched my needs as a virtualization-heavy user: enabling KVM/QEMU with a good setup was basically trivial. For virt-manager, it boiled down to running:

  • ujust setup-virtualization (once to enable it)
  • ujust setup-virtualization again (to set up USB passthrough)

That’s it.

So, conclusion: if you have an Asus ProArt P16, I strongly recommend Bazzite. I’ve also heard good things about CachyOS, but after the time I already spent experimenting, I can’t afford another round right now. I need to focus on work—and maybe in 3–6 months I’ll give CachyOS a try.

If anyone else is running Linux on the ProArt P16, I’d love to compare notes (especially around NVIDIA + power management + ergonomics).

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