Hey me again im going to do a clean install of Linux im currently on Debian stretch in order to have kvm pass-through to work. I would like to do a clean install of Linux without other software and only install what i need for my daily driver. I have been looking at Arch Linux but my worry is that i won't be able to install discord due to it being only available in a .deb or rpm files.
Now for DE i would like it to be light weight for the kvm pass-through and the reason im looking a DE is because i need a files manager to manage my drive. However i want the DE to look good as well. so far im liking gnome but it might be a problem with Wayland and amd r9 270 driver that going to be my host GPU. ATM im using my intel GPU for my host and the r9 270 is idle and my r9 390 for the pass-through.
TLDR
What Distro do you recommend and DE do you recommend and why ?
There are lots of threads about this floating around.
Some of the common recommendations are Arch, Fedora, and openSUSE (my personal choice), and like @Dje4321 said, you want a newer kernel if at all possible.
And yeah, DE is going to come down to whatever your personal preference is. As far as I know, it won't really make any difference to KVM QEMU operation.
fedora and opensuse are upstream to redhat, so why would redhat be the right answer?
kvm is not redhat's deal, gnome shell is more redhat's deal than kvm, and that's not a redhat-only show either. In open source, source is open...
only advantage of bleeding edge upstream distros is that they offer stable implementations of the latest kernels, which is a bonus in this case. OpenSuSE also offers Yast, which allows for live kernel patching, which is very practical in case of a custom kvm application with difficult graphics hardware passthrough, and OpenSuSE has snapper installed by default, which allows for fast and easy system restores in case things go wrong. Other than that, kvm is kvm is kvm, on any distro.
Alright i will try the distro in a vm first and test to see if i like them i thought the distro would make a difference when it come to KVM. As for the DE i thought going for a more light weight would help on the performance side of the VM so not really sold on the KDE DE.