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.
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.
Find someone bashing Ubuntu - they would HAPPILY choose Ubuntu over win11.
This is both : funny and true (more true than funny though ;) )
This needs to be pinned to every single “looking for a distro” post.
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.
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
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?
You can do that on Bazzite. The only thing I would say is that Bazzite is an atomic fedora distro meaning that the core OS is immutable and everything lives on a layer above the base OS. This helps stability for the OS and make rolling back and repairs much easier. But sometimes installing apps, especially apps that interact with the base OS can be a bit of a pain. On top of that, atomic distros are less common, which means that if you are looking for help, it will be a little harder to find stuff online.
Overall, I like fedora. I have used basically all of the DEs, but tend to hover between KDE and Gnome. Fedora is a little more recent than Debian, but it isn’t a rolling release like Arch or OpenSUSE. This means you get some of the newer kernel features, but the updates are still staggered and released at intervals and tested. I find it to be very stable.
They’re actually working on making a version specifically for game developers, but it isn’t released yet. There is also a more generic version for developers. dev.bazzite.gg
Sounds cool ill check it out when its ready
If you want gaming, check out POP OS (ubuntu/debian,) Garuda Linux KDE Gaming Edition (Arch) or CachyOS (Arch.)
I’m not sure about unreal, but install godot was pretty easy. That said if you end up needing to install any languages, tools, etc OSTree makes it a PITA
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 tried UE5 on Debian Testing and it seemed to work fine.
If it works there, it’ll probably work on almost anything.
Personally, I dislike Ubuntu, but if it’s been working for you, you shouldn’t have problems.
I really like Debian and think it’s not too difficult, but it isn’t for everyone and might not be your thing.
EDIT: Looking at the website for UE5, almost any distro released in the past 3 years should do the trick so long as the distro works on your hardware.
Thanks that is good to know
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.
For the new people on Linux, think of my impression playing with the different OS;
Similarities between Windows 10 and macOS is around 15%.
Similarities between Windows 10 and Linux Mint is around 20%.
Similarities between Linux Mint and Ubuntu is around 95%.
Similarities between Linux Mint and Fedora\OpenSUSE is around 90%.
Similarities between Linux Mint and Arch\CachyOS\Manjaro is around 85%.
And with Flatpaks/Snaps I would even now narrow the difference in the Linus OS as 95, 92 and 90% similarity. For what linux cannot do for you, unless it needs high processing or gaming anticheats, a Virtual Machine with Windows will just cover you without any problem.
What makes look different in Linux is the desktop environment (KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon…), no much the distro per se. Find the distro environment you like after playing 20min with it, and choose the Linux flavor you are ideologically/persuaded with the most… don’t worry about the rest.
Coming from Windows, OK with a bit of tech journey and into gaming here is my take in no order of preference.
- TuxedoOS if you are inclined to Debian/Ubuntu side. Slow updates but it has latest KDE and very stable in my experience.
- If you just want set and forget (minimal updates) Linux Mint (Ubuntus fall here too) Now, it is not very appealing aesthetics.
- Fedora. Probably the best overall, but if you have beef against IBM/Red Hat, ditch it, its superiority is very marginal. Gamers like the spin Nobara, some performance increase but minimal.
- Arch is not that unstable as portrayed, but one time in a critical time is bad enough, even if very rarely occurs. You assess your risk. The popular baby today is Arch’s CachyOS due to catering to gamers.
- OpenSUSE’s Tumbleweed is maintained quite good and very close to Fedora in being perfect overall, but fewer people behind and less support. I would only go with it if you have a specific reason why (German, Yast tools, rolling release but stable,…)
At the end, like many people say, it is likely you will hop… until one day you find that distro hoping is pointless and that all are actually very close to each other and could easily coexist with any of them all. The difficult and uncompromising aspect usually is with the desktop environment like KDE Plasma, Gnome, Cinnamon…
Sry for the link it is unrelated and i only put it there because i though i need to add my Instance.
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
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.
Go with Bazzite, if you don’t like it, just switch. You only need to backup one folder, your /home dir.
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.
If you run endeavour, you are basically getting Arch with a familiar installer, a few useful helper scripts, and a friendly community. You are still expected to know your hardware and your install. You are still expected to keep up with the Arch news, and make any manual interventions required. If you do that, endeavour is remarkably reliable.
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.
Recently endeavour changed the way they deal with some firmware related packages
Actually, that was Arch and as Endeavour uses the Arch repositories + the AUR, and their own repository for their additions, they were naturally affected.
I read a lot of advice online for distros, but my main needs are not really discussed.
You’re not special and Linux distros aren’t that specialized. They differ in packaging, upgrade philosophy, etc. There is no Linux distro that can’t do the things others do.
You dabbled with Ubuntu. Stick with it, you’ll be fine. Unless you really want mint, then go for it you’ll be fine.
The urge to distrohop can be a distraction, but an itch that needs to be scratched now and then. I tend to always end up where I started, but when I do I feel better about it.
