I have tried out many distros and have shortlisted, Fedora, Garuda, Nobara and NixOS, all with GNOME (it looks pleasing). I am a newbie and have heard that NixOS requires knowledge of terminals but I am fine with that. This would be my main laptop. I play games like RDR 2, Genshin Impact and Assetto Corsa and also some on emulators like Pokemon Emerald. I also need to be able to run Solidworks, MATLAB and possibly Ansys. I also code in Python, Java and am learning C and plan to learn Assembly. I am also recently interested in AI art and have dabbles in Automatic1111. This is basically all I use my laptop for. Which among the above would be better for me?
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Go with fedora it doesn’t really matter but fedora has some good software preinstalled
I recommend Fedora, don’t go with Nix, it is too niche and advanced, Nobara is also fine, anything based on Fedora will be fine, in fact it is soo good that there is almost no derivatives, stock is good enough, it’ll be a pleasent experience because it’s stable while being up to date, think more about the experience using it rather than it as a “product”.
Does Solidworks run on Linux?
I distro hopped quite a bit, landed on kubuntu, loved it, will stick with it
Of those I would go with Fedora. It’s a well supported leading edge distro that is well supported.
It doesn’t matter. People go on and on and on about which distribution is better for gaming. If it updates without crashing, use that one
I have tried out many distros
I bet you will try many more until you finally get bored and settle with one of those that you have tried. Apparently at that time you will stop asking “which distro is better for me” because you will already know the answer :)
NixOs is an immutable distro, I’d rule it out because of the hassle it implies. Garuda is a rolling release, so I’d say a plus if you want latest features, a minus if you’re looking for reliability. From what I see (haven’t tried it though) Nobara is fedora with user friendly fixes… So I’d sayNobara. But a lot of it is based on preference (I’m daily driving kubuntu and using flatpak as a main software provider)
Whichever you like.
I agree.
For the op remember that nowadays there are tool such as distrobox or conty which make the choice of the distro virtually irrelevant.
I think the best approach would be to analyze the package availability of each, if they have the programs you plan to use.
Arch is the one if you want bleeding edge software, but a bit too complex to setup.
Currently I’m using Nobara, which is based on Fedora, but imo has the best defaults, it comes with almost everything setup for gaming it’s just pleasant to use. But I do miss the AUR from Arch.
Arch is the one if you want bleeding edge software, but a bit too complex to setup.
archinstall?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/archinstall
Was simple enough for me to use it with my WiFi to setup. I didn’t do anything fancy other than use a secondary drive for data storage as a /data mount and using XFS as the filesystem.
That’s just the installation process, you still need to config the entire system, and that’s the most time consuming process.
With what you have listed and your stated needs I would suggest Fedora. Any of the ones you listed will work though.
Avoid Arch-based distros as updates often break them, especially with core system packages like NVIDIA drivers. I was forced to reset my computer many times, (excluding timeshift backups), and ran into so many issues it’s not even funny, like the recent NVIDIA driver memory leak causing system locks.
I switched to Ubuntu LTS and have had no problems since. Since they actually test packages and make sure they are stable before releasing.
This ^
I’d say or Ubuntu or Debian altho debian might require some more doing, it will be stable garanteed, i’d say better than ubuntu altho that’s my opinion (I use both btw)
This has not been my experience ever with a rolling release.
Nobara if you’re after the best, everything that can run on linux runs on nobara in my experience. Fedora if you are wanting a bit more stability (because sometimes nobara updates are awkward)
I’d say go with whichever Linux distro you feel most comfortable with. I would first highly recommend trying each as a virtual machine first to test which one you prefer. This way, you still can game while trying out each of the Linux distros all in different VM’s.
Even though Fedora is one of 3 Linux distros Red Hat uses as a testing bed for their professional Linux distro, I find Fedora is a very stable and somewhat fast OS that doesn’t sacrifice standard Linux security, which is exactly why I chose to replace Windows 10 22H2 with Fedora 38 originally, but distro upgraded to Fedora 39.
I was going to originally install Debian 12, especially since Debian happens to be one of the oldest still active Linux distros which to me meant it’s a reliably stable and secure OS. Only problem is, the Debian team sacrifices latest package availability over stability, which makes it unsuitable for gaming purposes for me.
I have tried Kubuntu (which is Ubuntu-based; Ubuntu is Debian-based), and found it to equally be as good as Fedora, but is rather slow at providing Kernel and KDE Plasma updates but it is solid, stable and secure.
I also tried Linux Mint Cinnamon (Ubuntu-based) and found it to also be as solid, stable and secure as Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu and it’s flavors.
Whichever distro you choose to replace Windows with is up to you, but do be well aware that, not all games that was built for Windows will run with WINE (which is a Windows compatibility layer for Linux). Genshin Impact is playable and many emulators has been natively ported over to Linux.
I tried their demo versions by using a live iso from my dendrite. Since it’s GNOME, it all looks and operates the same.
I recommend EndeavourOS; it’s arch-based but easy to install and use.