I’m a developer but I like to game in my free time. right now I’m dual-booting ubuntu and windows but I want to fully let go of it. I have heard about some linux distros that are tweaked for gaming like nobara and garuda. I was wondering if those would be as good as other distros for development. And if so what linux would you recommend. I have an nvidia gpu with an ryzen 7 cpu
Distros are generally just opinionated bundles of packages ranging from a package manager, and from there extends to the kernel and desktop environment.
What most people don’t realize is if you know what you’re doing, you can easily run any package manager you want. Now, this isn’t advisable as having multiple package managers on a system will ultimately result in them combating each other as to which packages should be on the system and end in a catastrohpic version-hell… But it IS possible.
Having said that, practically every distro has ways of getting the latest versions of an explicit package (say you want the latest nvidia drivers, or the latest kernel, etc - Arch has AUR, and debian-based distros have PPAs) - and worst case you can compile from source yourself given enough desire to do so. Controversially, there’s also Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage packages which all tout the ability to be distro-agnostic.
If you learn Linux enough, a distro is just a bootstrap to get you where you want to be, and not an actual operating system.
The three most important things about a Linux distro are: 1) Bootloader, 2) Kernel, 3) Package manager (some would argue #4 would be the init system, but systemd has pretty much cornered the market). Outside of that, it’s up to you how you want it to operate, and how you get it there.
Arch, for example, lets you start from scratch and install the minimal packages to bootstrap your system - meanwhile Gentoo literally starts a minimal bootstrap for you to completely compile and rice out your system. Any Arch, Debian, or Ubuntu-based distro will operate almost identical to each other, but may have tiny opinionated alterations (particularly release schedules, etc).
Personally, I hate any RHEL/CentOS-based distro and stay away from them - but that’s just my opinion. If you plan to use Linux in the enterprise environment, it may behoove you to educate yourself on the
yumpackage manager and some of the configuration nuances the distro comes with.Anyway, this is all to say - it doesn’t matter what distro you use, you can generally be on par with near-minimal frustration to any other distro.