Ancient nvidia card and linux

[friedpiggy]

So I have an old Dell laptop that has a 420m gpu in it. Never run Linux before. Laptop runs fine and currently has win 8 on it. Thinking of switching it over to Linux so I can continue to use it while away. It would mostly be used for a bit of word processing and playing 1 specific game (Neverwinter nights released in 2002 so not heavy on gpu) My questions are as follows

1 - Which distro would be best to get started with bearing in mind I have zero Linux experience
2 - Would the gpu be supported at all? from research I have done it seems that it is no longer supported on the newer kernels....
3 - How much pain will I be in to get to grips with the whole thing?

Thanks

 

[AstroTurf]

I asked Gemini for you. It says mint or lite, gpu will be fine and Neverwinter Nights has a native Linux version.

 

[oldhat]

Latest version of Fedora supports driver version 390 which supports the 420m. There are lots of guides on how to install Nvidia drivers for Fedora.

 

[Fulcrum29]

Just go with Mint or Pop!_OS. Fedora and Bazzite will also work. The issue is the desktop environment; anything Wayland will be a no-go.

I use Mint (Cinnamon) on exactly the same GPU on an old Samsung laptop.

Wayland runs deep nowadays.

 

[Hyades]

Second vote for MINT. I’ve been running it now on my gaming laptop for over a year. I’ve not had issues getting any of the games I play to work.

Google did tell me to run Pop_OS, which I did, and had endless issues! In my opinion stay far away… well for now anyways.