Hi, as many others I am looking to switch to linux before microsoft kills win 10. I read a lot of advice online for distros, but my main needs are not really discussed. I need a distro that runs well for game dev specifically unreal engine 5.4-6.
I am currently aiming to try mint, as it has been recommended to be stable and i already dabbled a little bit with Ubuntu on my laptop.
I am not afraid of some tech journey, but even though arch seems the coolest, with Wayland, kde, hyperland customization, i am not confident enough to use it for work. I heard it can completely crash your system if your a noob.
So in essence i need something stable that is relatively easy to use and has great ue5 and gaming perf. Thanks in advance for all the help.
Coming from Windows, OK with a bit of tech journey and into gaming here is my take in no order of preference.
- **TuxedoOS **if you are inclined to Debian/Ubuntu side. Slow updates but it has latest KDE and very stable in my experience.
- If you just want set and forget (minimal updates) Linux Mint (Ubuntus fall here too) Now, it is not very appealing aesthetics.
- Fedora. Probably the best overall, but if you have beef against IBM/Red Hat, ditch it, its superiority is very marginal. Gamers like the spin Nobara, some performance increase but minimal.
- Arch is not that unstable as portrayed, but one time in a critical time is bad enough, even if very rarely occurs. You assess your risk. The popular baby today is Arch’s CachyOS due to catering to gamers.
- OpenSUSE’s Tumbleweed is maintained quite good and very close to Fedora in being perfect overall, but fewer people behind and less support. I would only go with it if you have a specific reason why (German, Yast tools, rolling release but stable,…)
At the end, like many people say, it is likely you will hop… until one day you find that distro hoping is pointless and that all are actually very close to each other and could easily coexist with any of them all. The difficult and uncompromising aspect usually is with the desktop environment like KDE Plasma, Gnome, Cinnamon…
Everyone overthinks it, and you are too.
Mint is great. It may not work for you if you have super new hardware.
Fedora is great. It’s mint but with newer stuff.
Arch is great. Bleeding edge. But it’s not “set it and forget it”.
Linux is great. There’s a million other options. Any of them work if they work for you. Find someone bashing Ubuntu - they would HAPPILY choose Ubuntu over win11.
And you have to realize the “what version I’m on dependency hell” thing is a thing of the past for the most part. Flatpaks just about solve this problem. You’ve got containers and vms too. Switching to another distro ain’t hard either as a nuclear option.
Just install mint or fedora like everyone says. Your requirements aren’t special, and both options are great.
Find someone bashing Ubuntu - they would HAPPILY choose Ubuntu over win11.
This is both : funny and true (more true than funny though ;) )
This needs to be pinned to every single “looking for a distro” post.
I would go with something ubuntu based or fedora. If you want to learn then Bazziteos may not be for you since it’s ridiculously easy to figure stuff out on there. Instead, you might enjoy learning a system where you type some commands in the terminal like fedora or linux mint
Go with Bazzite, if you don’t like it, just switch. You only need to backup one folder, your /home dir.
I read a lot of advice online for distros, but my main needs are not really discussed.
You’re not special and Linux distros aren’t that specialized. They differ in packaging, upgrade philosophy, etc. There is no Linux distro that can’t do the things others do.
You dabbled with Ubuntu. Stick with it, you’ll be fine. Unless you really want mint, then go for it you’ll be fine.
If you’re new to Linux, you won’t stay with the distro anyone recommends for more than a month. It’s a truism.
I’m not you. You’re not me.
That said. Ubuntu isn’t the Ubuntu of old. The real selling point is the zfs, but you have all the other NIH stuff like snap etc. I’m not a zfs fan but I appreciate that it’s got a huge fan base.
One thing to say is that you don’t have to have a one and only. I have at least two distros I use daily for workstation stuff. I use Fedora for typing and Arch for backups, debugging, rescue, and other fiddling about stuff (because Fedora gets in the way sometimes). Every distro has the same set of commands.
distrowatch.com is your friend.
As a game dev I prefer Arch-base (I’m using EndeavourOS) and I use Godot. However if you think Arch may not be for you, then I suggest Fedora.
For a lifetime Windows user, going to Mint has been very painless. Gaming is very good as well.
I agree. The transition has been fairly smooth, and cinnamon edition looks great.
Mint is a great choice, it is very stable, and it really holds your hand via the Software Center.
However, stable also means old: it does not support the latest hardware.
If you have hardware that released after (rough estimate) April 2024, consider something based on Fedora, such as Bazzite, instead. It comes with modern drivers and should support modern hardware much better.
Bazzite was heavenly promoted for gaming, but there was no mention on using it for work. Does it work well for regular productivity, code, graphic design, 3d?
I’m not sure about unreal, but install godot was pretty easy. That said if you end up needing to install any languages, tools, etc OSTree makes it a PITA
If you want gaming, check out POP OS (ubuntu/debian,) Garuda Linux KDE Gaming Edition (Arch) or CachyOS (Arch.)
They’re actually working on making a version specifically for game developers, but it isn’t released yet. There is also a more generic version for developers. dev.bazzite.gg
You can do that on Bazzite. The only thing I would say is that Bazzite is an atomic fedora distro meaning that the core OS is immutable and everything lives on a layer above the base OS. This helps stability for the OS and make rolling back and repairs much easier. But sometimes installing apps, especially apps that interact with the base OS can be a bit of a pain. On top of that, atomic distros are less common, which means that if you are looking for help, it will be a little harder to find stuff online.
Overall, I like fedora. I have used basically all of the DEs, but tend to hover between KDE and Gnome. Fedora is a little more recent than Debian, but it isn’t a rolling release like Arch or OpenSUSE. This means you get some of the newer kernel features, but the updates are still staggered and released at intervals and tested. I find it to be very stable.
Of course you can, why wouldn’t you? It’s Fedora Kinoite with added stuff for gaming. There is a special edition for devs in the making, in case you’re interested in keeping an eye on that: https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/introducing-the-bazzite-developer-experience-alpha/7342/64
I think Fedora using either Gnome or KDE would be a great place for you to start. Ubuntu or Mint aren’t terrible choices either.
On the topic of Arch, there’s a Distro I use called EndeavourOS. It’s billed as an Arch based distro that’s geared towards the terminal, but unlike Arch it comes all of the basic software you might need right out of the box, and offers a long list of desktop environments (KDE, Gnome, and XFCE being the best choices on the list)
I use Hyprland on it, but Hyprland isnt advisable until you have some solid experience with a different desktop. Because it is geared towards the terminal, it expects you to install and update your software from the terminal. Not a difficult task, but it might not be ideal when you’re just getting started.
I saw endeavour os and though that might be the way to get arch benefits without getting too technical, but i heard its not the most stable.
If you run endeavour, you are basically getting Arch with a familiar installer, a few useful helper scripts, and a friendly community. You are still expected to know your hardware and your install. You are still expected to keep up with the Arch news, and make any manual interventions required. If you do that, endeavour is remarkably reliable.
I’ve been running it for a long time without issue. But how “stable” it is depends on how much you read the documentation and developer announcements, and how much you fiddle with things you don’t understand. That can be true in mint or Ubuntu as well, none of them prevent you from breaking things.
Recently endeavour changed the way they deal with some firmware related packages, this would cause an error when updating, causing a handful of packages to not be upgraded. A quick DuckDuckGo search of the error message took me straight to a forum post by the devs explaining that you have to uninstall one of the related packages, and run the update again. If you didn’t think to look you’d probably panic and think your system was broken. Just an example of how the operating system itself doesn’t hold your hand. It’s up to you whether that’s acceptable or not.
On the topic of stability, save your important files on a separate drive. It’s been said elsewhere in the thread but bears repeating. As long as your files are stored in a separate drive, if you run into issues you aren’t able to fix, you can just wipe and reinstall, it maybe takes 20 minutes depending on your hardware, and while you’re experimenting and learning, it wouldn’t be uncommon for you to break some things.
Operating systems are rarely unstable. Users are the most common source of instability.
Recently endeavour changed the way they deal with some firmware related packages
Actually, that was Arch and as Endeavour uses the Arch repositories + the AUR, and their own repository for their additions, they were naturally affected.
but my main needs are not really discussed
…
So in essence i need something stable that is relatively easy to use and has great ue5 and gaming perf.
That is probably the most common set of requirements people ask for. In reality, with a few exceptions, there is really not that much difference between distros given those requirements. UE5 is newer so the biggest change there would be that you might find distros that ship newer versions of stuff might run it slightly better then distros that ship older software. In practice I think it has been out for long enough that you wont see much difference unless you want to play something new on the day of release (but these days those are all buggy messes anyway… not sure your choice of distro will make as big a difference as waiting a few weeks/months for the initial patches to rollout).
Remember, all distros are essentially based off the same software, the biggest difference being what desktop environment they ship with and what versions of software there ship (and how how long they stay on that version). By far the biggest difference you will see if what desktop environment they use and all distros essentially package the same set of desktop environments - each might come with different ones by default but they typically contain all the popular ones in their repos.
i need something stable… great gaming perf
In particular these two points. Do you know what you are asking for here? These are the most bland and wishy washy requirements. Everyone wants something stable and fast, never seen anyone ask for something that crashes all the time and is slow. But worst these tend to be on the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of requirements, if you optimize for one you tend to trade off the other.
Even stability has multiple meanings. In terms of crash stability you will find all distros to be about the same. No one distro wants to ship buggy crashy software. But at times they do. And it is really just the luck of the draw as to when this might happen to you based on what software you use, how you configure your system and what hardware you have. Some combinations just don’t work for some weird reason and you wont know until you hit it. This is why you hear some people claim one distro is a buggy mess while some other one is rock solid while someone else argues the exact opposite. All main stream distros are just as good as any other in terms of this and you are just unlucky if you ever do run into that type of issue. The biggest problems in this regard tends to be when a new major version of something comes out - but like with gaming it can be beneficial to wait a few months for any issues to be patched before jumping to the latest big distro version.
The other side of stability is API stability - or the lack of things changing over time as new versions of stuff get released. There are two main types of distros in this regard, point release distros which freeze major versions of packages between their major releases so you wont get any new features during the release cycle that version of the distro. Then you have to deal with all the breaking changes from newer versions of software once every so often when a new distro version comes out. Vs rolling release distros that upgrade major versions constantly and so generally follow a lot closer to the latest versions of things than point release distros. Really the big trade off here is not if you encounter breaking changes.
Any distro will need to deal with them at some point, the choice is how often you deal with them. You can wait years on the same version of a point release distro and only need to deal with all the breaking changes once every few years, or once every 6 months. Or you can deal with things as they come out with a rolling release distro. But while it might sound nice to only deal with it every few years it also means you need to deal with all the changes at once. Which can be much more disruptive when you do decide to. Quite often I find the slower upgrading distros are better off with just a full reinstall on the latest version than upgrading from one to the next. Personally I prefer dealing with small things frequently as they tend to be easier to fix and less disruptive over longer periods of time. When I was running kubuntu I used to end up reinstalling it ever 6 months as the upgrades never worked for me (though this was a long time ago), but my oldest arch install lasted probably probably 5-10 years or so.
And at the same time how frequently you get the latest versions of things means you get any performance optimizations and support for newer hardware or newer games as well. But also any bugs or regressions. It is a double edged sword. Which is why stability and performance tend to be a leaver you can tune between rather than two separate things to can achieve. Just like overclocking, the more performance you can get out of a system tends to result in the system becoming less stable overall. Everyone wants the most stable and fastest system, but in reality everyone has a different limit on how much or what types of stability they are willing to give up on to achieve different levels of performance.
But out the box, you will find most distros to be very much within a couple of % of each other and which is fastest will vary depending on which games you want to play and what hardware you have. But they all tend to have quite a bit of head room to optimizes for specific use cases as they all are optimizing for the general use case which is typically just trading off performance in one thing for another. But again, we are talking about tiny difference overall.
I am not afraid of some tech journey, but even though arch seems the coolest, with Wayland, kde, hyperland customization, i am not confident enough to use it for work.
The only way you will gain confidence in it is to try it out. But also, most distros use wayland these days and it is more up to the desktop environment you use rather than the distro you use. hyperland is a wayland compositor and is in the repos of most if not all major distros. You should be able to install it on anything really. You can replace the desktop environment or install multiple ones side by side if you want to on just about any distro. The biggest difference between them is which ones they come with by default. But really if you are looking for a highly customized experience then Arch tends to be the way to do as you have less extra fluff you have to remove or work around when getting the system exactly as you want it. The hardest part of Arch is installing it the first time. Really after that it is not any harder to use or maintain. IMO it is easier to maintain as you have a much better understanding of how you set up your system as you are the one that set it up to start with.
I heard it can completely crash your system if your a noob.
You can break any distro if you mess with things. The only big difference is Arch encourages/requires more messing around at the start then other distros. And IMO is easier to fix if you do mess things up - you can always just boot a live USB and reinstall broken packages or reconfigure things without needing a full reinstall again. You can basically follow the install guides again for the bits that are broken to fix just about anything. And that is only if you break something critical in booting. In my early days I broke (requiring a full reinstall) way more ubuntu installs then I have ever broken my Arch ones later on. It is really just about how much you want to tinker with things and how much you know about what you are tinkering with as to if they will break or not rather then what base distro you use.
And you can always try the install process and play around with different distros in a VM to get a feel for them and learn what they are like. So don’t be afraid to try out various different ones and find the one you like the most. Your choice is never set in stone either. Just ensure you have good backups of everything you care about and the worst that will happen is you need to reinstall and restore your backups every once in a while.
Could somebody draw an advice flowchart - for a pinned post - which branches on the different common requirements?
I doubt that would help, sadly. There is SO MUCH advice out there already, but people always think they are special and have a very rare and complicated use case.
Sry for the link it is unrelated and i only put it there because i though i need to add my Instance.
I heard it can completely crash your system if your a noob.
You can crash anything if you try. Been there, done that. Just go ahead and start using it. Just keep backups which you always do, regardless the O/S and situation. (pro tip: TEST RESTORING THE BACKUPS)
Maybe make an extra backup before you try something and you’ll live. You could also use a separate partition to store your files so you can re-install without touching your data. Make that partition size ‘recognizable’ (t.ex. the biggest by far and label it) so you won’t mess up the partition selection when you re-install. And NO don’t ask me how I know!
ZorinOS
