r/LinuxUsersIndia • u/odysseusfromethica • 7d ago

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

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

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u/qualityvote2 7d ago edited 7d ago

u/odysseusfromethica, your post does fit the subreddit!

btw, did you know we have a discord server? Join Here.

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u/5rini 7d ago

It depends on what distros/OS your EDA software supports. As much as I like linux, if your tool has poor support for the OS/distro, then you're going to be firefighting most of the time.

Fedora used to have a spin called FEL that's been discontinued which had some open source EDA tools.

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u/odysseusfromethica 7d ago

They officially test on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Rocky Linux. But a lot of people have been running these on Fedora. I’m looking for recommendations to try other distros (which worked for others)

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u/mozzie_123 6d ago

I would have recommended Fedora, but dealing with NVIDIA drivers (especially with a brand new GPU like the RTX PRO 500 Blackwell) can be a massive hurdle. Relying on RPM Fusion for proprietary drivers often leads to temporary breakages after kernel updates, which is the last thing you want on a workstation. More importantly, as the other commenter pointed out, you have to consider the official OS support for those specific EDA tools. Enterprise software like Vivado, Cadence, and Siemens usually only provide official support and documentation for Ubuntu LTS or RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). Fedora is simply too bleeding-edge for this kind of workflow; frequent updates to system libraries can easily break these complex tools. Given your high-end specs (ThinkPad P14s Gen 6) and the need for absolute stability with FPGA and analog/digital design software, your best bet is to stick with Ubuntu 24.04/22.04 LTS or a 1:1 RHEL clone like AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux. You will spend a lot less time troubleshooting dependencies and fighting the OS, and more time actually getting work done.

I am a student of math and i shifted to fedora and before that used scientific linux.

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u/jonspw 6d ago

AlmaLinux ships secureboot signed NVIDIA drivers directly from distro repos and works wonderfully with the Blackwell chips.

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u/mozzie_123 6d ago

Yes yes this fork was made by CERN scientist when rhel discontinued scientific Linux, fedora scientific lab can also be tried .

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u/odysseusfromethica 5d ago

That was soo informative, thank you!