Hi, as many others I am looking to switch to linux before microsoft kills win 10. I read a lot of advice online for distros, but my main needs are not really discussed. I need a distro that runs well for game dev specifically unreal engine 5.4-6.
I am currently aiming to try mint, as it has been recommended to be stable and i already dabbled a little bit with Ubuntu on my laptop.
I am not afraid of some tech journey, but even though arch seems the coolest, with Wayland, kde, hyperland customization, i am not confident enough to use it for work. I heard it can completely crash your system if your a noob.
So in essence i need something stable that is relatively easy to use and has great ue5 and gaming perf. Thanks in advance for all the help.
Mint is a great choice, it is very stable, and it really holds your hand via the Software Center.
However, stable also means old: it does not support the latest hardware.
If you have hardware that released after (rough estimate) April 2024, consider something based on Fedora, such as Bazzite, instead. It comes with modern drivers and should support modern hardware much better.
Everyone overthinks it, and you are too.
Mint is great. It may not work for you if you have super new hardware.
Fedora is great. It’s mint but with newer stuff.
Arch is great. Bleeding edge. But it’s not “set it and forget it”.
Linux is great. There’s a million other options. Any of them work if they work for you. Find someone bashing Ubuntu - they would HAPPILY choose Ubuntu over win11.
And you have to realize the “what version I’m on dependency hell” thing is a thing of the past for the most part. Flatpaks just about solve this problem. You’ve got containers and vms too. Switching to another distro ain’t hard either as a nuclear option.
Just install mint or fedora like everyone says. Your requirements aren’t special, and both options are great.
OpenSUSE, you can rollback your OS if an update, or your own mistake, borks it. GUI interface for a lot of stuff. It defaults to enforcing Secure Linux these days. This is a good thing but means extra steps if you want to access certain things remotely, so you can set it to complain or off, instead of the enforcing setting.
I am using openSuSE for production at work, and also on my private main machine. The “killer-app” that makes this distro outstanding is snapper (for snapshot rollbacks), which is tightly integrated. It has a rather steep learning curve somewhere between mint and arch. But it is probably the most mature and stable rolling release distro out there.
Yes, its really good, and every time somebody say “Linux needs ____ to make its use easy for new comers”. My answer is typically uhm, openSUSE already has it.
That can be:
- OneClick installs
- GUI package management
- GUI service and system settings
- auto cleaning of btrfs
I’m looking at suse tumbleweed for an upcoming build. Ubuntu is getting obnoxious, mint is ugly and way behind on Wayland support and fedora I can’t really trust at this point as it’s a community version of a corporate American product. Like I could ignore the corporate stink before but -gestures broadly- not in this climate.
I liked arch but now that bcacheFS is getting yanked out of the kernel I don’t really have a reason to manually do so much myself anymore.
Update: installed mint and i am excited so far. didn’t test unreal yet, but gaming perf was great. Customization is really cool and i already got it to look modern with some theme icon combinations. Made a 🥭 in gimp as my home icon. Ran into very little issues so far. Except for one, where suspend instantly wakes up the pc and is therefore unusable. But i will figure that out another day.
Definitely update us on UE, I’ve haven’t explored the EU or Unity on Linux, and it would be nice to know if they work, because “you can use Godot” doesn’t work for everyone.
Except for one, where suspend instantly wakes up the pc and is therefore unusable. But i will figure that out another day.
Is this just an automatic suspend after inactivity? Because if so, I think it the inactivity timeout can be disabled in the settings menu, as a workaround until you can figure it out.
I got unreal working by simply unzipping the binaries you can download. It runs great, i would argue even faster then on windows (lumen enabled). Building an app in Linux worked out of the box. Some minor issues i had, left alt did not work. Figuring out how to make a launcher icon. After an update it needed new driver update aswell. Still no IDE to use C++ currently trying Rider.
Much better than I’d expected, that’s great to hear! The minor bugs are always annoying, but like you mentioned, the speed boost hopefully outweighs it.
Still no IDE to use C++ currently trying Rider.
I recommend: (vs)code, clion (free for noncommercial use), qtcreator
Rider works now (also only for non commercial) Will test vs code aswell.
Could somebody draw an advice flowchart - for a pinned post - which branches on the different common requirements?
Right, and I’d add a default option, e.g. “Unsure what to try first?” -> Yes ( Not -> rest of chart) -> “Try Debian Stable” -> “Do you like it?” (rest of chat)
I wouldn’t debian stable is no better than any other mainstream distro. Worst in some regards as it tends to have really old versions of things. If that sounds nice to you then go for it. But it is not the default choice or recommendation for most people.
I won’t enter the arguments about Debian itself (did that often enough, feel free to check my history or ignore entirely) rather my point is to have a default suggestion rather than “pick any” for newcomers which precisely are scared by the plethora of choices, as this very post suggests.
I think Fedora using either Gnome or KDE would be a great place for you to start. Ubuntu or Mint aren’t terrible choices either.
On the topic of Arch, there’s a Distro I use called EndeavourOS. It’s billed as an Arch based distro that’s geared towards the terminal, but unlike Arch it comes all of the basic software you might need right out of the box, and offers a long list of desktop environments (KDE, Gnome, and XFCE being the best choices on the list)
I use Hyprland on it, but Hyprland isnt advisable until you have some solid experience with a different desktop. Because it is geared towards the terminal, it expects you to install and update your software from the terminal. Not a difficult task, but it might not be ideal when you’re just getting started.
I saw endeavour os and though that might be the way to get arch benefits without getting too technical, but i heard its not the most stable.
I’ve been running it for a long time without issue. But how “stable” it is depends on how much you read the documentation and developer announcements, and how much you fiddle with things you don’t understand. That can be true in mint or Ubuntu as well, none of them prevent you from breaking things.
Recently endeavour changed the way they deal with some firmware related packages, this would cause an error when updating, causing a handful of packages to not be upgraded. A quick DuckDuckGo search of the error message took me straight to a forum post by the devs explaining that you have to uninstall one of the related packages, and run the update again. If you didn’t think to look you’d probably panic and think your system was broken. Just an example of how the operating system itself doesn’t hold your hand. It’s up to you whether that’s acceptable or not.
On the topic of stability, save your important files on a separate drive. It’s been said elsewhere in the thread but bears repeating. As long as your files are stored in a separate drive, if you run into issues you aren’t able to fix, you can just wipe and reinstall, it maybe takes 20 minutes depending on your hardware, and while you’re experimenting and learning, it wouldn’t be uncommon for you to break some things.
Operating systems are rarely unstable. Users are the most common source of instability.
