Yet another distro choice help post
So sitrep:
Newish desktop
- i7-13700K
- 64Gb DDR5 6000Mhz
- RTX 3070Ti
- MSI PRO Z790-P
(WiFi is not a factor, permanent ethernet connection.)
Needs:
- Gaming
- Music composing
- Coding (Mostly python)
- Video editing
I've been using Linux on and off throughout the years, but lately I've fallen out of the loop somewhat. Started with Slackware around 1998, Kubuntu in the 2000's, Ubuntu 2010's, Kali and Mandrake 2020's -> on my laptop, Ubuntu server on my RasPi. At work, we have a few Fedora servers I have to maintain. So not a complete novice, but somewhat obsolete info.
I have been looking at the immutable distros, like Bazzite and Pop!_OS as I've done the whole song and dance of constantly repairing my distro because of various issues, and I'd like my main recreational machine & distro to be low maintenance, I get to fix linux servers at work enough already, I don't want to bring that home.
With gaming, I've understood that linux has come a loooooong way since I last tried sometime around TBC Launch for WoW when Wine barely worked with it.
Music composing is a little annoying, since apparently both Ableton and FL studio are not an option. I've heard good things about Reaper, but I'll have to do some more research. Feel free to educate me on this topic if you have some insider info. I don't play live sets, just compose and mix.
Video editing, currently I use Davinci Resolve, and apparently it works fine on Linux, just some limitations and shenanigans with codecs. Alternatives are welcome, I don't need 90% of what resolve offers, I can make do with a simpler software as well.
Thank you kindly in advance for departing thine wisdom.
EDIT: Ended up installing Bazzite, and KVM virtualizing OpenSuse Tumbleweed and vanilla Fedora, keeping my backups for now on the NAS so I will be able to easily nuke & go with Tumbleweed (I think) next, since so many people seem to swear by it. Thank you everyone for the great advice!
![Destroyed and heavily damaged residential areas following the Israeli attacks on the cities of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip are seen from the Gaza-Israel border region on May 20, 2025. [Mostafa Alkharouf – Anadolu Agency]](https://friendica.eskimo.com/photo/preview/640/8022147 "Destroyed and heavily damaged residential areas following the Israeli attacks on the cities of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip are seen from the Gaza-Israel border region on May 20, 2025. [Mostafa Alkharouf – Anadolu Agency]")
asudox
in reply to Rappe • • •Rappe
in reply to asudox • • •poinck
in reply to Rappe • • •I would say, that Fedora and Debian are mostly care-free if you go with the defaults. Fedora can enable Flatpak as part of the installation and for Debian the installation guide can be found on Flathub. In both cases you can then install packages using gnome-software.
I have edited videos with Blender, it has a video editor built-in which is very intuitive. And you can explore compositing with it later. Text and graphics for videos I created with Inkscape (export them to PNGs). The graphics are just linked, so if you need to correct a spelling mistake in Inkscape you can overwrite the original PNG and Blender will pick it up. I think with Blender you can use all video codecs that are supported by ffmpeg.
For music you can have a look at Ardour. I did not use it in a long time, but previous version were enough for me to master a track.
Games: Just install Steam through Flatpak (gnome-software). But it depends mostly on the game whether it will be playable on Linux; check protondb.
Rappe
in reply to poinck • • •Thanks for the alternative take. Good to know that Fedora supports Flatpak that easily.
Blender has a video editor?! Geez, used it back in the day for 3D rendering, but didn't even cross my mind for videos. Inkscape is a great idea!
Had a couple of recommendations for Ardour from other folks as well, will have to give it a go. Free is free after all.
Games fortunately I have the most experience with lately, was in another country with my ancient T530, and was bored, so did some gaming on Ubuntu, got mostly everything working pretty quickly.
Horse {they/them}
in reply to Rappe • • •it is surprisingly good, when i first found out about it i was kinda blown away with how competitive it is with stuff like Kdenlive and the ancient version of sony vegas i used to use
Matt
in reply to Rappe • • •swab148
in reply to Rappe • • •Rappe
in reply to swab148 • • •swab148
in reply to Rappe • • •Rappe
in reply to swab148 • • •mina86
in reply to Rappe • • •linuxiac.com/new-to-linux-stic…
If you want a quick answer: Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition
New to Linux? Stick To These Rules When Picking Distro
Bobby Borisov (Linuxiac)taaz
in reply to Rappe • • •If your primary usecase is going to be music (so a need for realtime capabilities for stuff like recording, VSTs and DAWs) then I do not reccomend immutable distros for a simple reason: you will probably/eventually need to hack something up to get it to work and at that moment, the immutability is just extra work.
As far as I have tried fiddling with the music stack on Linux (which is not that much), the whole pipewire/JACK/carla stack is a bit messy and I can't imagine it working with flatpacks due to the sandboxing/permissions.
Rappe
in reply to taaz • • •Aye, audio latency was a big question I didn't find a good answer for during my research period. It is a headache on Windows as well.
You do make a really good point I didn't think about the immutables for music stuff. Cheers for that.
swab148
in reply to Rappe • • •atzanteol
in reply to Rappe • • •Throw a dart, pick a distro. My God these "help me pick a distro" posts are irritating. You're not special. Your usecase is not special. Distros are "similar but different".
What do you use at work? Use that one.
Mordikan likes this.
Mordikan
in reply to atzanteol • • •What always gets me is recommendations for what seem like weird obscure distros that I've never heard of.
What should I use for gaming?
Well, for that you need Fizzlegit!
It was released in 2025, is a derivative of a derivative of a derivative, and uses the same repos, but it has Steam preinstalled. Its totally next-gen!
Rappe
in reply to atzanteol • • •atzanteol
in reply to Rappe • • •It's free, just for you.
Your question was bad and you got bad answers. What did you expect?
MyNameIsRichard
in reply to Rappe • • •atzanteol
in reply to Rappe • • •Hey - I would like to get into your hobby and have done literally no research about it - which is the best to get to start with?
Mordikan likes this.
pyssla
in reply to Rappe • • •Honestly, Bazzite seems to fit like a glove:
Nvidia can be an ass to work with on a lot of distros, but Bazzite delivers the right drivers OOTB.
Bazzite is setup for gaming OOTB; it's bundled with Steam and Lutris, makes use of custom kernels/schedulers to optimize performance for gaming and contains many other goodies like excellent controller/peripheral support.
Provides a specialized DX (i.e. Developer Experience) image that comes with all the goodies you might expect.
Has a built-in
justscript that downloads, installs and sets up Davinci Resolve for ya:ujust install-resolveThis is the only I'm not 100% sure yet because you haven't provided explicitly yet what you'd like to use. But, I can't image it would be harder to get this running on Bazzite compared to other distros.
And last, but not least:
Through utilizing the
bootcmodel, Bazzite is as low maintenance as they come.Bazzite - Next-gen Linux gaming, now for your workstation
dev.bazzite.ggJumuta
in reply to Rappe • • •pastermil
in reply to Jumuta • • •Destide
in reply to Rappe • • •With DAWS you've also got Ardour and Bitwig both have great compatibility and flathub.
There's also vcv and a few other great tools for music creation.
obnomus
in reply to Rappe • • •GitHub - ilya-zlobintsev/LACT: Linux GPU Configuration And Monitoring Tool
GitHuboverload
in reply to Rappe • • •lemmus
in reply to Rappe • • •