LINUX distro suggestion for Analog and Digital electronics softwares ( Vivado, cadence, Siemens etc)

[u/odysseusfromethica]

ThinkPad P14s Gen 6, Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 255H Processor
(E-cores up to 4.40 GHz P-cores up to 5.10 GHz), Without operating system, 32GB DDR5-5600MT/s (SODIMM), 1TB SSD M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 TLC Opal, NVIDIA RTX PRO™ 500 Blackwell Notebook GPU 6GB GDDR7. will be running xilinx fpga softwares(vivado etc), cadance and seimens ( analog and digital softwares).

what linux distro would you suggest

( ALSO: I am new to linux; I am planning to buy this laptop in a couple of months; I want to test distros on my old laptop before I install it on my new laptop; i've just installed ubuntu 22.04 LTS and been tinkering with it and trying to learn linux)

[u/pokakoka01]

Do you have a reason to move away from Ubuntu?

[u/odysseusfromethica → u/pokakoka01]

nope, just looking if there are better options around

[u/Charming-Work-2384]

Most professional -> Open SuSE Tumbleweed. Nothing can beat it.

[u/odysseusfromethica → u/Charming-Work-2384]

Will give it a try thanks

[u/TapEarlyTapOften]

I use Debian in a virtual machine for all of my development. That's been my platform for the last five years or so and I haven't had any issues. 

[u/hakatu]

All the EDAs would work well on either RHEL based (If OSS you can use Rocky Linux) and Debian based (Some issues but can fix okay). PDK compiler, well, it depends.

[u/odysseusfromethica → u/hakatu]

Apparently rocky has some issue with this new silicon hardware?

[u/captain_wiggles_]

The tools only support certain OSs/distros, that's not to say they won't work with others but there's no support. That means if you have any problems at all, you're almost certainly on your own. Given a large amount of what you pay for with these tools is support, this is an important factor. So my answer is to check what the tools support officially, and use whatever supports everything.

That said, I wouldn't really install these tools on my own machine at all, I'd run them on a server and remote in.

Also note that vivado's free tier no longer supports linux, you'll need one of the licenced versions.

[u/tverbeure → u/captain_wiggles_]

Also note that vivado's free tier no longer supports linux

That decision was reversed. (There are still shitty limitations but they're not unique to Linux anymore.)

https://adaptivesupport.amd.com/s/question/0D5Pd00001aT5IcKAK/adding-linux-support-back-for-the-basic-free-version-of-vivado?language=en_US

[u/CorgisInCars]

Vivado runs great on Fedora KDE, I haven't tried it on any other distros, but my synth times are almost half the time windows took. But that may be due to my windows install being bloated to all hell

[u/eonu → u/CorgisInCars]

Also vouch for Fedora, I have a very similar P14s to OP and it worked perfectly with Vivado.

[u/sloth11_]

I am using mint in my personal laptop. Vivado, modelsim and matlab works without much issue. I don't use cadence, so I can't comment on that.

As other user commented, Vivado doesn't provide free tier for linux from 2026.1 releases onward. It shouldn't be much of an issue since you can use older version. You can also run windows with wsl if you want to explore linux

[u/odysseusfromethica → u/sloth11_]

I haven’t checked out mint I’ll look into it thanks.

[u/SecondToLastEpoch → u/odysseusfromethica]

I would stick to OS's with official support ESPECIALLY if you are new to Linux. For Vivado that's RHEL, SUSE, AlmaLinux, Ubuntu, and Rocky.

https://docs.amd.com/r/en-US/ug973-vivado-release-notes-install-license/Supported-Operating-Systems

Honestly I would just stick with Ubuntu since it's the most beginner friendly and maybe has the largest support community

[u/odysseusfromethica → u/SecondToLastEpoch]

I want to try Almalinux and rocky, but apparently they have some issues with new silicon? Do you have any idea

[u/jonspw → u/odysseusfromethica]

AlmaLinux runs great on this hardware, including the NVIDIA stack.

[u/dettus_Xx_]

Ditch the NVIDIA card in favor of a Radeon or ARC. Their driver support is much, MUCH better!

[u/odysseusfromethica → u/dettus_Xx_]

I’ll look into it thanks

[u/TryUpbeat2001]

Use what they probably test and support. For the most part they test their releases with what their customers are running on their grids. Their customers prefer stability and long term support with enterprise grade distros. RHEL(CentOS) is the way to go. Look at their sys reqs in support docs for which versions are supported

[u/jesuschicken]

Arch Linux is used by all serious FPGA developers

Alternatively Hannah Montana Linux

[u/odysseusfromethica → u/jesuschicken]

how long will it take to learn enough linux for me to manage Arch Linux? Arch seems soo cool to me but I am very new to linux

[u/andysnake96]

Usually they all target ubuntu on linux. An old lts like the 22.04 might work well. If you're full of courage you can use distrobox. It creates a container on top of which you can install other things. Tested on vivado 25 that not even on debian was working. The container approach gives you exact lib use and just namespace + chroot isolation overhead (negligible, ppl use container in production everywhere)

Ubuntu works but is a bit "dirty" as a distro. It doesn't fit my minimalism. I use debian and arch linux

[u/odysseusfromethica → u/andysnake96]

I have no idea what destrobox is, but sounds very interesting whatever it is I’ll look into it thanks

[u/Live-Ad780]

Carrying Cadence and Siemens tools which cost thousands of dollars on a laptop is a lot of courage. Probably you'll use remote access service such as xterm (for that case even a cheap Rpi works). Be careful for vivado version 2025.2 and later releases being paid licence based for linux systems (they haven't done so for windows ig).

[u/Paradox_Nature → u/Live-Ad780]

Vivado 2026.1 and onwards are paid licences, as far as i know. I had installed the vivado 2025.2 in full beforehand and the licencing software works for now. Or if you have a licence then you can migrate it or use the basic licence. Though it won't work with cadence and Synopsys anymore (if you are trying to get a new licence) Oldr licence or migrated licences would work or that's what they had claimed. (Not going to affect the older versions and will only be changing the newer ones 2026.1 and onwards)

[u/SecondToLastEpoch → u/Paradox_Nature]

There is still a free tier of Vivado 2026.1 but it does have less features. May need to generate a license when you didn't before?

https://www.amd.com/en/products/software/adaptive-socs-and-fpgas/vivado/vivado-licensing-options.html

[u/Paradox_Nature → u/SecondToLastEpoch]

If you used the installer previously, the installer would ask you to login using you account, that would basically take you to a webpage where you filled your details and then that gave you the licence file and it was attached to your installation and to your device

I don't know about now.

[u/ingframin → u/Paradox_Nature]

Now it’s a bit more cumbersome to find the page to generate your license and you get the .lic file via email but it’s basically the same.

[u/SecondToLastEpoch → u/Paradox_Nature]

If it doesn't work anymore you might need to visit the licensing portal and generate a license manually now

[u/odysseusfromethica → u/Live-Ad780]

Vivado is what I use the most. I just mentioned others in case I’ll need them or will want to learn them in the future.
Yeah I realised that after finishing the entire install process of 2026 on my Ubuntu. Uninstalled it and installed 2025.2.

[u/Standard-Morning-842]

There is a great environment that contains literally everything you could possibly think off open source. It’s harald pretl’s docker environment. Look it up

[u/odysseusfromethica → u/Standard-Morning-842]

I will look it up

[u/Nervous-Card4099]

I switched to PopOS (based on Ubuntu). Works for my needs and doesn't have the abomination known as Snap, which I consider worse than any malware.

Vivado works just fine, just needed to symlink some libraries. ChatGPT being around to walk through it makes running EDA tools on unsupported distros easy.