I'm dual booting Pop_OS and Windows 11 for now while l try things out. I went with Pop_OS for the NVIDIA drivers, since I have a NVIDIA card. Installation went smoothly, but setup is where things started to get a little weird.
I have 2 monitors, a main 360hz monitor and a secondary 165hz monitor. I seem to be able to have them both working at the same time in Windows 11 without issue, but in Pop_OS, setting the refresh rate to 360hz on the first monitor causes both displays to stop working properly. The 360hz monitor will stop displaying picture all-together, and the 165hz monitor will start flickering wildly. Turning off the second monitor brings the 360hz's image back, but then I'm down a monitor. Also, if I set the refresh rate to anything lower than 360hz, they'll both work. I'd like to still be able to use it at the native refresh rate, but I can't seem to find any other solutions or anyone else who seems to have had this same issue.
My second (slightly less annoying) issue is that I can't seem to use HDR in games. Is this normal, or is there something I can do to bring back support?
Also, if Pop_OS isn't the way to go, please let me know! I tried Nobara first, but immediately had issues with the displays locking up and flickering before I even got it installed.
Popping in to give an update before calling it a night!
First of all, thank you for all the help! I've been reading through all the comments here and trying a few things out. The first thing I tried was switching the default desktop environment from the default Gnome to KDE. I much prefer KDE to Gnome since I have experience with it on the Steam Deck, so this is the solution that I had the most hope for. Sadly though, things are much worse in KDE. Unlike in Gnome, KDE has the terrible screen tearing that was mentioned in X11, but is still similarly unable to support running the monitors at different refresh rates. Since a lot of the comments here mentioned Wayland though, that was my real end goal in getting KDE installed. Unfortunately, witching over to KDE Wayland, things became significantly more unusable and it was about the same experience I had while trying to install Nobara. Both displays were totally unresponsive for seconds at a time and I was only able to interact with things during brief moments when they would stutter along instead. This was pretty painful to log back out of and was an overall mess like a couple of you had mentioned it might be.
I went back to Gnome after this. Since KDE didn't seem to be they way forward, I figured I might as well try enabling Wayland on Pop_OS's built in solution. Wayland support was hidden by default on NVIDIA as mentioned, but one quick config edit later and the option appeared. Things seem to be going much better now! I'm running Gnome Wayland right now and while things aren't flawless yet they're significantly better than before. Both monitors are working at their full refresh rates now without any screen tearing or flickering. As for gaming, so far I only have Helldivers 2 installed running through Proton, and performance is about 8% worse than in Windows on the same graphics settings while on the ship. I am also getting an odd visual bug where the in-game menu looks like it opens and closes very quickly every once in a while. It's not actually open or intractable though, it's more like the game randomly displays a single frame from when I did have the menu open to change the graphics settings. Tomorrow I'll try enabling Proton experimental and see if that fixes anything, and also try installing some more games.
I'll come back again to give an update on how things are going then! I'm still lacking HDR and there are other bugs that look like they need to be ironed out, but I'm much more optimistic about this than I was before. I think I'll keep dual-booting for now, at least while I'm still trying to get everything working properly, and hopefully that next version of Pop_OS brings HDR support. For now, it's at least nice to know that different monitor refresh rates are working.
Thanks for the update. When it comes to dual monitors, I’m in the same spot. Reading through the comment section, I found that Bazzite OS is what might suit me. As for the environment, I was going for KDE; however, after reading your update, I’m sceptical about it.
Glad to hear things are improving and you haven't given up!