Okay so with the success of diablo 3 in Wine, I want a distro I can run for wine, that runs well, but I also want one that's good with KVM PCI pass through.
I am torn between mageia or sabayon or manjaro, I know my way around each distro so don't class it as a beginner thing, I want a distro with raw performance in wine and KVM, rolling or section release doesn't bother me.
Thanks!
Manjaro has pacman and Sabayon has portage, both are easy to use.
If you like gnome use Sabayon.
Both can be made lightweight via XFCE
Sabayon does have some quirks like Samba not working out of the box.
Arch
While great distros, Debian testing and Korora are great for gaming on Linux and for KVM. Highly recommend those, but if you insist on a minimalistic approach then I prefer Mankato over Arch due to the ease of use. All in all, it really depends on what distro your good with working with. You can ask for suggestions all day, but you don't know till ya try every one.
Arch is very minimal, with a slight learning curve. It is true rolling release, so you get the newest and greatest software immediately.
The OpenSuSE 13.2 beta is out. In November, 13.2 will come out with the then mainlined 3.17 kernel. OpenSuSE is the community development branch of SuSE, which is in the process of coming home to Europe on a shareholder-level right now, as Attachmate is selling Novell to the UK-based Micro Focus, one of the oldest UNIX and Cobol enterprise IT specialists. SuSE in Nürnberg has been largely unaffected by the Novell ownership, except for the Microsoft deal, which has turned out to be quite beneficial, both for sales (Microsoft has turned out to be a very good linux vendor), and for finances of the OpenSuSE project. What is probably going to change with the new ownership, is that SuSE will probably focus less on backward compatibility with old technologies, which was always a number one priority with Attachmate as it is an important thing in the US, and will probably focus more on modern technologies, which also explains why OpenSuSE has been pushing ahead with bleeding edge stuff lately, and 13.2 beta is now based on the current mainline 3.16 kernel, and will be released on 3.17 and... a KDE 5 opt-in (that's on a stable release, not on Factory, which is quite remarkable).
In my opinion, OpenSuSE has poven that corporate affiliation (with Microsoft no less) doesn't have to work at the detriment of the product, unlike other distros, like Fedora for instance, where the typical shortsighted US corporate mismanagement by RedHat not only trickles, but torrents down on Fedora and CentOS.
One of the big advantages of OpenSuSE is that it is specifically optimized for virtualization, not only offering latest kvm/qemu and lxc, but also offering a full Xen complement pretty much out of the box.
The new administration tools (Yast, was already awesome and arguably the best comprehensive system control GUI of any operating system) have been completely redone in ruby, and are simply amazing, with a new level of ease of use in advanced system control, never seen before anywhere. The new installer is also pretty sweet, offering a lot of finetune settings up front, right in the install GUI, before the installed system is even first booted. This is particularly great for easy deployment.
It's not the slimmest distro in the world, but OpenSuSE KDE sure sets new standards in my opinion, and KDE 5 is a speed demon, it's incredibly fast and has a remarkably low memory footprint for such an extensive modern desktop environment. KDE 5 is not entirely finished yet, there are some rough edges graphically that still need to be ironed out and there are still a few KDE apps that haven't been ported over yet, but judging by the incredible productivity of the KDE community, that won't take very long.
You might want to try 13.2 beta out. It's still a beta though, there will be hurdles, but negotiating those hurdles will provide necessary debug information the community needs to streamline 13.2 for final release in November.