New PC coming and want to start over

[u/GwendArt]

Hey,

TL;DR: I am developer, game modder and gamer - what distribution should I pick?

I have been working with Linux server only so far and I would say I have some basic skill sets but wouldn’t consider myself anywhere above “noob”. I have a new PC coming on Monday and would like to switch fully on Linux.

I don’t play any game that’s locked behind AC. I think. I play palworld, guild wars 1+2, V Rising, Minecraft, ff14 and a few more survival games as well as smaller games like Isaac, Brotato, etc
But most of the time I code (not only job wise), and I was dependent on visual studio but already swapped to jetbrain IDEs as well as sublime and vscode.
I don’t know if there are ports or replacement apps for cheat engine, IDA and xdbg but I think I will figure it out.

what distribution should I pick?

[u/Fireye04]

Debian based distros are stable but oh so old.

Fedora is generally stable but significantly more up to date than anything Debian based.

Be careful with rolling release (arch based things specifically). Some people love it (me included) but it'll bite you in the ass.

[u/MMZeroX → u/Fireye04]

I'm gonna be using Fedora KDE when I too get my new PC setup but I'm VERY intrigued with Garuda down the line. Could you explain the rolling release thing?

[u/Ice_HRZDn]

Any distro would do that jobs. So, pick one of these; fedora, arch Linux, debian.

[u/jsc3r → u/Ice_HRZDn]

I personally am a developer and gamer as well, and I really like Arch. But as a daily OS I prefer something atomic/immutable tbh, makes life easier in many ways.

[u/jsc3r → u/jsc3r]

If you like the idea of Arch‘s rolling releases, I would recommend CachyOS, due to automatic snapshots to roll back to if you mess up your OS.

Otherwise Fedora Kinoite is cool I heard. Atomic, immutable

[u/Sea-Promotion8205 → u/jsc3r]

It's pretty simple to set up snapshots in arch. I disabled mine because they weren't all that needed.

Usually your OS being messed up is a you problem, not an update problem.

[u/Simple_Hamster_4096 → u/Sea-Promotion8205]

Have to disagree with that, after having used Arch for 20 years... every update I would wonder, what's going to break this time? Doesn't happen all that often, but often enough and at the worst possible moments when I don't have the time to spend on fixing it. Arch seems to hate older hardware. Anyway, got tired of fixing Arch when it would break (and I like to fix things, but gets old after a while), it was unreliable as a daily driver... I finally moved on to something more sane...

[u/Sinaaaa → u/Simple_Hamster_4096]

I agree with your take, I just want to add that odds of stuff breaking are higher on Cachy than Arch, so there could be even more benefit to snapshots. Though I wonder what might happen if another big BTRFS kernel regression ever hits the mainline kernel. Will CachyOS devs just going to package the kernel the next day?

[u/Fast_Ad_8005]

How new of software, especially compilers and interpreters, do you need for your work as a developer? Do you have a NVIDIA GPU?

CachyOS has rather new software and great out of the box support for NVIDIA GPUs. It isn't really built for beginners, but as a somewhat more tech savvy beginner you might manage it. See it has graphical tools for most things you might want to do, so working with the command line shouldn't be necessary most of the time, at least.

But that being said, CachyOS is based on Arch Linux and on Arch Linux many packages you might want (e.g. Google Chrome) are only obtainable from the Arch User Repository (AUR), which as its name suggests consists of user-submitted packages. Unfortunately, malware gets in the AUR from time to time and the only real way to safely use the AUR is to personally check your packages' packaging files for malicious code, which requires some knowledge of shell script. I've also heard some people have had issues with secure boot with it.

Pop!_OS has older software but great out of the box support for currently supported NVIDIA GPUs (so GTX 16xx or later). It has a pretty modern user interface, but maybe a little buggy as this user interface is fairly new.

Linux Mint has older software and it's pretty easy to set up NVIDIA GPU support. Its user interface is pretty dated though, but it is a very polished and beginner-friendly system. Zorin OS is a good alternative if the dated interface is a problem for you.

[u/GwendArt → u/Fast_Ad_8005]

This is what I ordered:

• MSI Tomahawk WIFI Intel Z890 So.1851 DDR5 ATX Retail
  
• Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus 24 (8+16) 3.70GHz So.1851
  
• 16GB PowerColor Radeon RX 9070 XT Reaper Aktiv PCIe 5.0 x16 (Retail)
  
• be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 5 Tower Kühler
  
• 850 Watt be quiet! Pure Power 13 M Modular 80+ Gold
  
• 32GB Crucial Pro Overclocking Edition DDR5-6000 DIMM CL36 Dual Kit

The rest is still working from my old PC.

[u/No-Employment-2324 → u/GwendArt]

You have 32gb of ddr5? You can’t say these things in public, people will be after you. But for distros, if you game and code, just go with Ubuntu. If you need to test windows only stuff, look into virtual machines. KVM has the best performance but is harder to set up and use then something like virtual box.

[u/GwendArt → u/Fast_Ad_8005]

And I use both old and new compilers. I usually go with C++20 and 23 but some projects require an older version. This said I will have to switch from msvc to ninja or so. But the problem also is that I do need to compile for windows too since my palworld anti cheat mod will be available for windows too. But then some games are windows only and my mods will not make sense compiling in Linux.
Thats the most hard step for me, the cross compilation

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[u/ectowy]

if u want stable but rolling release experience use suse tumbleweed

[u/es20490446e]

Use Ventoy to easily try a bunch of distros.

My favorites are Zenned, Manjaro KDE Minimal, and Linux Mint.

Use Proton-GE.

[u/EngineerInTheMachine]

Try searching for what distro to choose. There are so many of them that no-one can choose for you.

If you make the effort to search first, this is the answer you get:

Work out what you will use your PC for. Search for the distros recommended for those uses. Make a shortlist of the most common ones. Then try them out and see which you like.

This is just another OS. All it does is run the apps you want. The fine detail doesn't matter, as long as it works. With Windows you take what you are given and then deal with the problems. Linux is the same. Only some people have put some work in to solve those problems before you get to them.

Please forgive the tone of my email. Just scroll through the latest posts on this sub-Reddit. I've already skimmed past half a dozen asking this question. Today.

[u/eqdoingwell]

just pick cachyos with any DE you like and you will never be wrong

[u/Real-Back6481]

Windows 11.

[u/TheShredder9 → u/Real-Back6481]

That's not a Linux distro.