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.
I tried UE5 on Debian Testing and it seemed to work fine.
If it works there, it’ll probably work on almost anything.
Personally, I dislike Ubuntu, but if it’s been working for you, you shouldn’t have problems.
I really like Debian and think it’s not too difficult, but it isn’t for everyone and might not be your thing.
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?
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.
I don’t recommend Bazzite. I’m far from an expert (I’ve only used Mint), but I see a lot of people recommending Bazzite. You should definitely test on Bazzite, but it’s immutable and so that’ll probably cause a lot of issues. I’d recommend strongly against Bazzite for gamedev.
I think basically any major distro will work (Ubuntu, Mint, OpenSUSE, Arch). You’ll probably need to run the software in bottles, so if it supports bottles then it should work for your needs. Only go with Arch if you’re willing to sign up for some extra work.
Be sure to make backups. That way it won’t matter if you brick your OS.
For a lifetime Windows user, going to Mint has been very painless. Gaming is very good as well.
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.
For the new people on Linux, think of my impression playing with the different OS;
Similarities between Windows 10 and macOS is around 15%.
Similarities between Windows 10 and Linux Mint is around 20%.
Similarities between Linux Mint and Ubuntu is around 95%.
Similarities between Linux Mint and Fedora\OpenSUSE is around 90%.
Similarities between Linux Mint and Arch\CachyOS\Manjaro is around 85%.
And with Flatpaks/Snaps I would even now narrow the difference in the Linus OS as 95, 92 and 90% similarity. For what linux cannot do for you, unless it needs high processing or gaming anticheats, a Virtual Machine with Windows will just cover you without any problem.
What makes look different in Linux is the desktop environment (KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon…), no much the distro per se. Find the distro environment you like after playing 20min with it, and choose the Linux flavor you are ideologically/persuaded with the most… don’t worry about the rest.
Always Arch.
OpenSUSE, you can rollback your OS if an update, or your own mistake, borks it. GUI interface for a lot of stuff. It defaults to enforcing Secure Linux these days. This is a good thing but means extra steps if you want to access certain things remotely, so you can set it to complain or off, instead of the enforcing setting.
I am using openSuSE for production at work, and also on my private main machine. The “killer-app” that makes this distro outstanding is snapper (for snapshot rollbacks), which is tightly integrated. It has a rather steep learning curve somewhere between mint and arch. But it is probably the most mature and stable rolling release distro out there.
Thanks for the advice, I will go ahead with trying mint first. Then a fedora to compare performance and a separate partition/drive for messing up arch/endeavour. Just have to disable bitlocker… Because that’s how my last mint experience ended up xD
If Mint works for you, just stick with it. No need to try a different distribution to compare. You’ll know when you need it.
I would only go to Fedora if you need it. For example newer drivers (kernel, mesa). Don’t go change the kernel and/or mesa on a distribution, probably better to switch at that point. Or if you need KDE or GNOME for some reason. Wayland is disabled in Mint by default, but can be enabled. It’s been over a year IIRC since they added experimental Wayland support so it may be fine by now.
Differences between Linux distributions are exaggerated.
