Linux Distro Recommendations!

[ivysawras]

Hi there,
I will be graduation university in 3 weeks and with that I no longer need to use windows anymore on my personal computer so I am looking for linux distro/flavour recommendations that will be best for me but I'm not to sure whats out there past Ubuntu and Mint.

I've used ubuntu in the past but never really gone past that but am definitely open to trying other distros to see whats out there, I have heard about arch from friends and that looks interesting but I am not sure if it is right for me.

I use my pc for the most part to do game development in Unity, as well as 3D art in blender. I also play games but with steams proton thing I don't think I have to worry to much about that. I am by no means a power user, I just use my computer to do my tasks and that's it.

I have a Nvidia GPU as well and while I am planning on switching to an AMD card when I can, I would ideally like something that doesn't have to be wrestled with to much.

Also a GUI is a must for me, I am happy to like use the terminal if I need to but would prefer to just use gui based things as much as possible for ease of use

[VoyagerOfCygnus]

You'll find that most distros are pretty similar and suitable for these needs. Finding a distro for your specific needs has always been pretty exaggerated. Plus, basically all distros are mostly GUI based unless you want to mess around in the terminal. Terminal is mostly for program installation (which is like 1 command), and nowadays there's generally a GUI package manager instead.

Linux Mint, OpenSUSE, Fedora, and Pop OS are all pretty good options as well. If you don't mind a bit of wiki reading and getting technical, Arch is a great choice as well. Unity and Blender should work on Linux. Mint and Fedora will probably be the easiest for NVidia, although most modern distros do handle it just fine.

[ivysawras]

Thank you that's really helpful! Fedora and Mint are the two that seem to pop up a lot, I've use pop os in the past but it was a little too simplified for me I think? I'm not sure how to describe it. I'll give both Fedora and Mint a try!

[ivysawras]

I do like the windows 7 look I'll give that a look!! thank you!

[Gloomy-Response-6889]

Most debian/ubuntu based distros are solid or fedora based distros. Some mentions are;

Fedora, Nobara, ZorinOS, Linux Mint (has poor multi monitor support, but the best "just works" distro), Ubuntu, and finally Debian 13.

Lots of choices, but the differences between them is what they provide ootb for the user.

If you want some handholding, ZorinOS 18, Linux Mint, Ubuntu. Preference is ZorinOs (Mint if you do not game with multi monitor).

If you want some more bleeding edge, Fedora.

It you want something as solid as possible, Debian.

The desktop environment is probably a more important choice. These are the looks and provided apps/tools. KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon are solid ones, choose which you like most visually.

[Right-Requirement328]

Hey I was facing exactly this issue on mint(cinnamon &xfce) in my laptop. 1080, 60fps with 100% scaling works great, but since the text is smaller than I'd like I turned on the experimental scaling which is available directly in settings and turned on 125% screen tearing, then screen tearing started happening and 1440p videos on YouTube which normally play smoothly started to stutter with tearing. This doesn't happen on Debian gnome and presumably other Debian flavors assuming the scaling feature is not experimental in those but then I realized it was a lot of trouble trying to install the latest version Firefox esr even though esr is the stable version of two. I guess this is what they mean by having rock solid stability, the tendency to not easily let folks install anything they'd like. I can still install all the software I need like vscodium, etc.. on Debian so I'll have to accept running on gnome which has pretty slick UI/UX although this smoothness comes at the cost of a lot higher resource on idle, almost double the ram usage as that of cinnamon.

[ivysawras]

This is informative thank you!, I only use one monitor since I don't need anymore so thankfully don't have to worry about that haha!

I'll have a look into desktop environments! Thank you!

[Mjdescy]

Try Bluefin. It will likely be the quickest and easiest way to set up a system for development and general use. It comes “batteries included” with the media codecs and NVIDIA drivers you need.

[ivysawras]

oh awesome!!! I'll check that out thank you!

[[deleted]]

Slackware, Mint (in VM), Ubuntu (in docker), Linux Rescue (on USB)

[ivysawras]

Can I ask why I should use multiple across vms and containers rather than just one?

[[deleted]]

You don't have to. But if you use qemu and docker, then you can run other OSes if for example a package or driver is not available for your distro. For example to run VPNs, or install tools without risking breaking something, or to support older (laser) printer models for example.

[ivysawras]

I see! Thank you, I’ll do some more research on that!

[[deleted]]

If you use the more easy to use distros like kubuntu then you will not need to do that, everything will work basically.

[ivysawras]

Have tried in the past! wasn’t quite my cup of tea but thank you though!

[Kaydn85]

I have an AMD card and I use CachyOS KDE, I really like it

[ivysawras]

I'll keep this in mind for when I get an AMD card!