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.
Bazzite was heavenly promoted for gaming, but there was no mention on using it for work. Does it work well for regular productivity, code, graphic design, 3d?
Of course you can, why wouldn’t you? It’s Fedora Kinoite with added stuff for gaming. There is a special edition for devs in the making, in case you’re interested in keeping an eye on that: https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/introducing-the-bazzite-developer-experience-alpha/7342/64
I’m not sure about unreal, but installing godot was pretty easy. That said if you end up needing to install any languages, tools, etc OSTree makes it a PITA
For a lifetime Windows user, going to Mint has been very painless. Gaming is very good as well.
I agree. The transition has been fairly smooth, and cinnamon edition looks great.
Sry for the link it is unrelated and i only put it there because i though i need to add my Instance.
Thanks for the advice, I will go ahead with trying mint first. Then a fedora to compare performance and a separate partition/drive for messing up arch/endeavour. Just have to disable bitlocker… Because that’s how my last mint experience ended up xD
If Mint works for you, just stick with it. No need to try a different distribution to compare. You’ll know when you need it.
I would only go to Fedora if you need it. For example newer drivers (kernel, mesa). Don’t go change the kernel and/or mesa on a distribution, probably better to switch at that point. Or if you need KDE or GNOME for some reason. Wayland is disabled in Mint by default, but can be enabled. It’s been over a year IIRC since they added experimental Wayland support so it may be fine by now.
Differences between Linux distributions are exaggerated.
There is also little reason not to try out different ones to compare if you want to. Nice to see what they are like for yourself if you have the time to.
Go with Bazzite, if you don’t like it, just switch. You only need to backup one folder, your /home dir.
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.
but my main needs are not really discussed
…
So in essence i need something stable that is relatively easy to use and has great ue5 and gaming perf.
That is probably the most common set of requirements people ask for. In reality, with a few exceptions, there is really not that much difference between distros given those requirements. UE5 is newer so the biggest change there would be that you might find distros that ship newer versions of stuff might run it slightly better then distros that ship older software. In practice I think it has been out for long enough that you wont see much difference unless you want to play something new on the day of release (but these days those are all buggy messes anyway… not sure your choice of distro will make as big a difference as waiting a few weeks/months for the initial patches to rollout).
Remember, all distros are essentially based off the same software, the biggest difference being what desktop environment they ship with and what versions of software there ship (and how how long they stay on that version). By far the biggest difference you will see if what desktop environment they use and all distros essentially package the same set of desktop environments - each might come with different ones by default but they typically contain all the popular ones in their repos.
i need something stable… great gaming perf
In particular these two points. Do you know what you are asking for here? These are the most bland and wishy washy requirements. Everyone wants something stable and fast, never seen anyone ask for something that crashes all the time and is slow. But worst these tend to be on the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of requirements, if you optimize for one you tend to trade off the other.
Even stability has multiple meanings. In terms of crash stability you will find all distros to be about the same. No one distro wants to ship buggy crashy software. But at times they do. And it is really just the luck of the draw as to when this might happen to you based on what software you use, how you configure your system and what hardware you have. Some combinations just don’t work for some weird reason and you wont know until you hit it. This is why you hear some people claim one distro is a buggy mess while some other one is rock solid while someone else argues the exact opposite. All main stream distros are just as good as any other in terms of this and you are just unlucky if you ever do run into that type of issue. The biggest problems in this regard tends to be when a new major version of something comes out - but like with gaming it can be beneficial to wait a few months for any issues to be patched before jumping to the latest big distro version.
The other side of stability is API stability - or the lack of things changing over time as new versions of stuff get released. There are two main types of distros in this regard, point release distros which freeze major versions of packages between their major releases so you wont get any new features during the release cycle that version of the distro. Then you have to deal with all the breaking changes from newer versions of software once every so often when a new distro version comes out. Vs rolling release distros that upgrade major versions constantly and so generally follow a lot closer to the latest versions of things than point release distros. Really the big trade off here is not if you encounter breaking changes.
Any distro will need to deal with them at some point, the choice is how often you deal with them. You can wait years on the same version of a point release distro and only need to deal with all the breaking changes once every few years, or once every 6 months. Or you can deal with things as they come out with a rolling release distro. But while it might sound nice to only deal with it every few years it also means you need to deal with all the changes at once. Which can be much more disruptive when you do decide to. Quite often I find the slower upgrading distros are better off with just a full reinstall on the latest version than upgrading from one to the next. Personally I prefer dealing with small things frequently as they tend to be easier to fix and less disruptive over longer periods of time. When I was running kubuntu I used to end up reinstalling it ever 6 months as the upgrades never worked for me (though this was a long time ago), but my oldest arch install lasted probably probably 5-10 years or so.
And at the same time how frequently you get the latest versions of things means you get any performance optimizations and support for newer hardware or newer games as well. But also any bugs or regressions. It is a double edged sword. Which is why stability and performance tend to be a leaver you can tune between rather than two separate things to can achieve. Just like overclocking, the more performance you can get out of a system tends to result in the system becoming less stable overall. Everyone wants the most stable and fastest system, but in reality everyone has a different limit on how much or what types of stability they are willing to give up on to achieve different levels of performance.
But out the box, you will find most distros to be very much within a couple of % of each other and which is fastest will vary depending on which games you want to play and what hardware you have. But they all tend to have quite a bit of head room to optimizes for specific use cases as they all are optimizing for the general use case which is typically just trading off performance in one thing for another. But again, we are talking about tiny difference overall.
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.
The only way you will gain confidence in it is to try it out. But also, most distros use wayland these days and it is more up to the desktop environment you use rather than the distro you use. hyperland is a wayland compositor and is in the repos of most if not all major distros. You should be able to install it on anything really. You can replace the desktop environment or install multiple ones side by side if you want to on just about any distro. The biggest difference between them is which ones they come with by default. But really if you are looking for a highly customized experience then Arch tends to be the way to do as you have less extra fluff you have to remove or work around when getting the system exactly as you want it. The hardest part of Arch is installing it the first time. Really after that it is not any harder to use or maintain. IMO it is easier to maintain as you have a much better understanding of how you set up your system as you are the one that set it up to start with.
I heard it can completely crash your system if your a noob.
You can break any distro if you mess with things. The only big difference is Arch encourages/requires more messing around at the start then other distros. And IMO is easier to fix if you do mess things up - you can always just boot a live USB and reinstall broken packages or reconfigure things without needing a full reinstall again. You can basically follow the install guides again for the bits that are broken to fix just about anything. And that is only if you break something critical in booting. In my early days I broke (requiring a full reinstall) way more ubuntu installs then I have ever broken my Arch ones later on. It is really just about how much you want to tinker with things and how much you know about what you are tinkering with as to if they will break or not rather then what base distro you use.
And you can always try the install process and play around with different distros in a VM to get a feel for them and learn what they are like. So don’t be afraid to try out various different ones and find the one you like the most. Your choice is never set in stone either. Just ensure you have good backups of everything you care about and the worst that will happen is you need to reinstall and restore your backups every once in a while.
arch seems the coolest, with Wayland, kde, hyperland customization
While I have no experience with Unreal Engine, so I can’t give an informed recommendation, I just figured I’d point out that you can do this with every distro
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.
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
As a game dev I prefer Arch-base (I’m using EndeavourOS) and I use Godot. However if you think Arch may not be for you, then I suggest Fedora.
I want to recommend pop OS but it would be wise to switch to it after there is 24.04 (or later release)
In my personal experience pop os has been absolute rock solid especially with flatpaks However latest stable is quite old (they are working on new desktop environment before upgrade).
I’m not sure about unreal engine compatibility, but I’ve been using Fedora Silverblue and it works good enough. Sometimes I’ve seen graphical bugs, but they are fixed quick enough for me to not care too much. Since I use the computer for work (and I don’t have much time to fiddle with my system) I have found that an atomic distro is the one that requires less maintenance, so it allows me to just do my work without having to troubleshoot things breaking. I have switched a lot of linux distros because I was never satisfied with how things looked or worked (and because of bugs with nvidia and other things, I am a long time linux user and things have never worked as smooth as today, now that we have wayland and proton and a lot of nice things). At the end of the day, I believe that the best thing to do is tho choose one of the most popular distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Arch) and make adjustments to fit your needs. Distro hopping is fun, but not so much when you’re short on time and you have stuff to do. Hope this helps.
I would go with something ubuntu based or fedora. If you want to learn then Bazziteos may not be for you since it’s ridiculously easy to figure stuff out on there. Instead, you might enjoy learning a system where you type some commands in the terminal like fedora or linux mint
It’s rare that a software compatibility is distribution specific but just in case for games you can verify with ProtonDB and for the rest WineHQ AppDB. That’s assuming there is no native support which in this case according to a quick DuckDuckGo search returns https://linuxvox.com/blog/unreal-engine-linux/ indicating that it seems fine.
So… I’d suggest you pick whatever distribution you heard most about, if you are unsure I’d advise on Debian (Stable) but honestly I don’t think it matters much. There might be slight difference in hardware support and performances but assuming you use mainstream hardware it hopefully should have minimal impact.
Regardless of what you choose, document the process and as long as you learn while doing it, you’re going forward!
If you are in rush… maybe postpone the transition to after that project or do it with a 2nd computer.
