I am in the process of building my own PC. Nothing fancy, just something that is much more powerful than the old PC I currently have. I’ve been using Linux on my laptop for a few years now (KDE Neon), and I’m very happy with it, I would like to put Linux on my next PC, but I have my doubts…
I don’t know if I should stay with the distro I already use or if there is one that better suits my needs.
On the one hand, I’m a graphic designer but I’ve been using only FOSS for many years, I only use Adobe in the office (reluctantly). On the other hand, I have seen that thanks to Steam with Proton gaming on linux is getting better and better. What I don’t know is if SteamOS can be good not only for gaming.
I would like to know if there is a distro that works well both for gaming and designing using FOSS (like Krita, Inkscape, KDEnlive, etc) or if it’s ok to stick with KDE Neon.
Stick with what you’re familiar. You can run Proton with any distro most likely.
Pop_OS! is touted as being designed around gaming and creative purposes. I use it as a daily driver and can’t complain, it plays nicely with whatever I throw at it gaming wise.
I tried Pop about 6-8 months ago and had lots of trouble with the nvidia drivers on it (and, subsequently, ubuntu and mint) with a bog-standard RTX3060. Pop’s particular issue was that whenever I tried to update the video driver, no matter which version I used (except closed-source 555-server, for whatever reason) it hard-locked my system and on reboot had reverted back to the default video driver (so my 40" ultrawide screen was trying to do like 1024x768 and shit). I have since tried 2 seperate Ubuntu installs (LTS and non-LTS) and Mint in the last month, and all of them refused to even initialize the GPU. So, just a heads up for folks with nvidia cards, Ubuntu-based distros might give you trouble. Fortunately Nobara 42 (fedora) is working great.
The answer is always OpenSuse.
Kidding. Stick with what you know works.
But seriously: OpenSuse.
Just joking.
Not.
When I started using Linux more frequently everyone recommended Manjaro for gaming. Since then many people berated me for even mentioning it…
I’ve been using it for years and never had any problems; both gaming and graphically intensive apps run perfectly. It’s best to go with all AMD, given how bad Nvidia drivers seem to be.
Honestly this is one of the things I hate about the Linux community. The distro elitism is over the top. Make recommendations, but don’t talk down to others or you’ll never get Linux to grow.
Manjaro is sort of speedrunning things. It is not a responsibly managed project. You CAN get shit done with manjaro the same way you can drive to work by just flooring the accelerator the entire way. It’s a bad idea but technically it can work.
Ok.
I have no idea about graphic design, but for gaming I’ve seen Nobara (made by the guy who created Proton-GE) recommended a ton for its frequent updates and many default-installed compatibility options. Been using it about 2 weeks now myself and most things just work great (which is a hell of a relief; I had a ton of issues with Pop, Ubuntu, and Mint hating my bog-standard RTX3060 GPU for whatever reason.) Had some trouble getting battle.net/epic games working through lutris, but nothing too hard to sort out, and steam games have (with the sole exception of Marvel Rivals) just worked.
While doing your research, check out Garuda, it is gaming focused and I have found it extremely user friendly.
bazzite is the way to go imo. it feels light years ahead of all the other gaming focused distros, ive tried all of them. it does take getting used to, but once you figure it out, its rock solid. nothing breaks. its almost boring in a way, lol. everything just works and i basically never have to fix or research anything. ublue has an insane amount of contributors on bazzite in comparison to other gaming distros as well, ive submitted many issues to them and patches are applied quickly. for example: garuda has around 9 contributors, cachyos has around 7, nobara has maybe 10, popos has 39 (some are full time employees). what does bazzite have? 113 or so. but they’re also not a typical distro, theyre an image of fedora kinoite/silverblue. a lot of the effort is shunted onto the supermassive org (24k+ contributors) that fedora/rhel is and many of their patches are upstreamed. the update process is very seamless and smooth due to this method of organization.
just remember to install most things through flatpak, distrobox, and brew. and you’re set. i love atomic for cluing me into distrobox, distrobox is straight up the laziest way to use linux and i love it. if you need some niche program that some dev only released .deb files for or only fedora/opensuse/aur commandline instructions, its got you. it just works. its somewhat similar to WINE and lets you run any linux distro installer and program as natively as possible.
also look at this fun graph for fedora atomic spins. as an fyi the fedora project as a whole has around 300k active users
