Why do I want to switch?
I have ran Linux Mint 21.2 for roughly a year and some change. While it is an excellent choice and provided a smooth transition out of Win10, I have ran into some things that I don’t like.
Now all of my complaints are fairly arbitrary and debatable. For example, I needed bleeding edge support for a GPU I purchased recently, and while you are absolutely able to acquire that kind of support on Mint 21.2/Ubuntu 22.04, I did have to jump through quite a few hoops.
Plus I’m not entirely certain I fixed all of the support issues, or did it in a stable or recommended way. For someone who is more intelligent, I’m certain that kind of OS customization is trivial, which is why I consider my desire to change personal and subjective.
I’ve been considering Debian 12, though my concern here is whether it will support my GPU. From what I’ve seen, the oldest kernel I’ve been recommended to use is 6.3 I think, and Debian 12 is running 6.1.
What I am looking/will use it for:
- A system that is not going to blindside me with complete failure.
- I don’t think there are many scenarios that this would apply to as I’m an extremely cautious user. I never update/change anything unless I am confident I can return to a working state before I need to return to my work from home job on a Monday. That being said, I do need it to be consistent as my job depends on having a working machine, Monday through Friday.
- For context, I work as a web developer and use things like Apache2, MySQL, Intellij, Node, Golang, Docker, I think you get the idea…
- Software engineering work.
- Support for fairly new hardware - 7800xt AMD GPU.
- Music engineering.
- I use Reaper as my DAW of choice. This is just a hobby so I’m okay with needing to do a bit of leg work to get things the way I like it.
- Video editing.
- Sometimes I work on little things here and there, like editing a friend’s video for a YouTube thing.
- Video games.
- Video game development - I’ve been building a retro top down RPG for a while now and currently use Godot.
- I also use Aseprite to create my own assets/pixel art.
You must log in or register to comment.
I would rather jump through the hoops to install the graphics drivers in Mint, Debian or Ubuntu than to run something that might be less stable. Although, I don’t use any of above distros (not for work, so I am fine).
Use ppa or some source for graphics driver. Otherwise install minimal apps from repos. Use flatpak and AppImage when possible. For development, recommend distrobox, as you may have to install tons of packages that you don’t need for functional distro.
OpenSUSE Aeon? It’s bleeding edge, immutable and awesome. :)
Given that’s it your working device if I understand correctly I will stay with something known and reliable: OpenSuse or Fedora
Both have the support of big names, are well maintained and provides more recent components than Debian.
OpenSuse has an amazing btrfs integration with snapper so it could give it an edge, but you could do about the same with Fedora. No wrong choices with those too.
A Debian testing (unstable/sid otherwise until hardware work on testing) setup with libregaming github tools, game streaming tools/services like on boilingsteam website and a vfio setup check reddit) should do. [most games should work that way apart really few fps games]
You could use a time machine like backup tool or btrfs snapshots.
DAW will be best with a low latency kernel, pulseaudio, Pipewire and jack, check Bitwig, Ardour and Reaper. [still complex on Linux]