I’m in need for some recommendation in terms of what linux distro to use. I have been using debian for the better part of 5 years on / off for home use and solid 5 years of debian as my daily driver for my work when possible.
And now that i need to build a new machine as well as the motherboard is dead pretty much due to the PSU going sideway and taking motherboard and cpu with it pretty much. I might as well switch to linux at home as well. My wife is also willing to try it out as well.
My use cases are as follow
Gaming (steam proton should be fine here from my understanding)
General home use, webbrowsing etc
streaming a bit (she streams video games from time to time)
Has to be able to work over wifi, if i need a special motherboard that is fine as well, i take recommendations as well here. CPU is gonna be a 9600X.
Recording software is OBS and should just work from my understanding on most distro’s.
The hardware i have left over that isn’t dead
AMD GPU 7800xt
I don’t really have any opinions on distro’s, the only reason i personally used debian is because of that was the OS the company was running or the OS was based on.
The distros i have been looking at so far is:
Ubuntu (here stuff like KDE etc is fine honestly)
Fedora (both workstation, and silver edition i think it was called?)
Linux Mint
It has to be some what easy for her to use as well. She doesn’t mind learning a new UI to use.
Side note:
I am planning on building a second machine later this year with a 9070XT so if a distro can support the drivers etc i would be happy but i am willing to put in the work for it.
Thanks in advanced for all the suggestions and recommendations.
UPDATE:
Okay so I have thought more about the need and my wife has also told some more of what she wants to do. She wants to stream and record and keep it simple as possible. Plus I need a new server anyway. So I will be making a server with a recording VM on it as well. This is something I have done before and is quite easy for me to setup. I have some older 1650 super card laying around which is good enough for this. So the machines only need to do gaming and web stuff. Anything that has to do with my game dev hobby is something I will figure out later. It’s not important in this regard as I do use unreal engine that does have a Linux version of the engine. Also a change to learn how to make games for Linux as well!
I have been looking thought all of the recommendations and will be continuing to read them and do some testing. I have a spare machine I can test the different distros on and see what work. Maybe I will give arch a run at some point
Fedora is good but while the silverblue edition is hard to break, it is annoying to use and I dont think its a good place to start with, considering all the flatpaks arent really from the original developers (only a portion are blue-chwck verified).
The point is: use the Vanilla GNOME Workstation edition.
Pop! OS and Ubuntu are the main contenders in my book. Both use .deb, though Ubuntu snaps are the devil.
I run Debian Unstable, myself. I do not recommend it, same problem as running Arch - things are more stable than Arch, but every now and again a system breaking bug is introduced. Waiting for Cosmic desktop to be fully released, and after that I’m seriously considering installing Pop.
Ubuntu has two strikes for me, Snaps and the strong push towards Ubuntu Pro (which is free, but not really happy about the telemetry implications). I was a happy Ubuntu LTS user up to 22.04.
Pop!OS, will have gamery schtuff, embedded from jump [just choose between open source / nVIDIA]
Underpinning, is that of Ubuntu… If not mistaken, the interface is a heavily modded GNOME
9070 reg/XT is still very fresh, so few growing pains, still to be addressed [see Level1Linux video]
Any reason you’re not looking at Debian anymore for second run?
I got games working under it via Proton. Wifi works too. Steam did take some time to get it installed as it’s not in Debian’s repos by default.
I can’t vouch for compatibility with other software as I’ve never tried them.
Look into an app called heroic game launcher. Just add your epic game store / gog / amazon prime game credentials and where you’d like the games install and the app will do the rest and kinda looks and feels like steam.
I have had more trouble with debian based systems than anything else. I, and many others, have run arch linux on my gaming pc for nearly two years with no problems. Arch core repo is very solid, sure it rolls out updates regularly, but very rarely has any major issues. Packages in Arch aren’t frozen to year or two old versions, so you get all of the good bug fixes that debian/ubuntu won’t see until the next point release.
Debian is good if you need a system with maximum uptime. I suggest Arch, or even Fedora or OpenMandriva, for the best compatability with newer hardware, games, and drivers.
Pro tip: don’t ask people for distro recommendations, we will just argue about it for weeks to come.
Sounds like Pop_OS would be the best choice for you. I haven’t had any issues with gaming, even with my Nvidia GPUs due to Pop_OS’ proprietary Nvidia drivers. It’s based on Ubuntu and uses .deb, so I think you’ll be right at home. Version 22.04 LTS is very stable, if there are some things about it that are old, like the version of X11 it uses.
The UI is pretty good straight out of the box. I’m sure you can rice it if you’re into that (I haven’t tried extensively), but for someone who just wants something usable I haven’t had any issues with it. Desktop environment for 22.04 LTS is GNOME; not much to say there that you can’t find on the internet already. Pop_OS 24.04 will come with COSMIC, which should be a lot more performant and customizable.
Installing most applications is pretty easy; the Pop Shop has almost everything you need, though you’ll also need Flatseal because most of the installations are Flatpaks (though you can choose to install .deb for applications that have that). However, for gaming (like Steam) I just download them the Windows way by going straight to the website source to avoid this entirely. This is a Flatpak issue though and nothing pertaining to Pop OS, but I did want to mention it.
I picked this distro because I had similar needs: stability and ease-of-use (especially with games). I can confidently say that Pop_OS succeeds in both in the 8+ months I’ve been using it since I moved from Windows 10.
Fedora is good but while the silverblue edition is hard to break, it is annoying to use and I dont think its a good place to start with, considering all the flatpaks arent really from the original developers (only a portion are blue-chwck verified).
The point is: use the Vanilla GNOME Workstation edition.
[/quote]
Hmm that is a concern i didn’t think about!
I have used flatpaks but always went on the flatpak hub or downloaded the official flatpak if there was one available. I will keep this in mind, thanks!
I will have to look into this, thanks for the tip!
@wertigon
Pop OS? i have seen some of it, just never really used it before for a longer periode. I was using it for a short while but i had some weird issues with it. Thinks has probably change since then. I will take another look at it.
@GoldenAngel1997
I used ubuntu back in unity days, and gnome on debian. From what i rememeber its a modifered gnome that ubuntu uses, doesn’t annoy me at all. I have seen worse. When it comes to 9070XT i am personally fine with dealing with some issues until they’re fixed, i did see the video from level1linux, that was also the reason i posted in here to get some recommendations. My desktop has been dead for well over 3 months now… I work way to much to have time to fix but i kinda need to just fix it now.
@Katie
It was mostly software when it came to home stuff and drivers. At work i use it when possible. Just that i mostly do networking and Azure work now so i need a windows machine for testing intune and packages before depolyment. And also company police prevent me from using anything else then windows now… Beside that its just wayland mostly. Some of the graphics stuff i need to do i need wayland back then. I don’t remember what the software was or the reason. I think it was because of nVidia back then. I can’t remember.
@LeeTalbert
Doesn’t suprise me honestly. I rarely use reddit for a reason.
@LeeTalbert
Arch has been on the radior, my only concern is that my wife also need to use the machine and it needs to be stable and easy for her to use. I have nothing against Arch at all. Just never really used it before. I might have a crack at it in a virtual machine for a periode to see how it goes.
@Mingtendo
Wife mostly game on the system. I don’t have that much so i stick to emulation on a ASUS Ally for the most part. I will have to try this distro out. I keep hearing alot of good things about it.
For X11 part, wayland is by no mean perfect. It has its own issues. The only reason i moved to Wayland was some software and driver that didn’t work as it should on X11. I can’t remember what software or driver it was, probably nVidia. Ohh yeah i remmeber now it was because of multimonitor support that didn’t work for shit in x11. Probably has been fixed. This was on Debian so probably a bug more then anything. also some HiDPI stuff.
I will have a look at the software shop. it might help her a lot. mostly she just uses steam, a browser and obs. Which i normally setup for her to be a one button solution.
@wertigon
I will have a look, i have heard of it and used it once, it never really worked for me. but i was trying some really old games that rarely plays nice on even windows.
I’m in need for some recommendation in terms of what linux distro to use. I have been using debian for the better part of 5 years on / off for home use and solid 5 years of debian as my daily driver for my work when possible.
I use Debian Stable as my daily driver and that includes gaming.
My suggestions for using Debian Stable are:
Learn to use backports, i.e. sudo apt install -t bullseye-backports linux-image-amd64 firmware-amd-graphics
Install Steam via Flatpak
I recommend Plasma or Cinnamon for people with experience using Windows.