Hello community,
I am tired of windows slowing down my laptop, and I tought I’d give linux a chance. So I learn, that there are many linuxes, and I wonder if it really matters. which one to choose. Can all linux apps be run on all distributions? Is it just a matter of the ‘app store’ supporting them or not?
I am producing media art for theatre plays. So I have to rely on a stable system as well as the following tools:
- Blender 3d
- a DAW
- Design Software (adobe alternatives)
- Video Editing & compositing
- Projection mapping (I fear, there is just mapmap under linux)
- audio cuing (linux show player)
- maybe also light show programming (artnet / dmx)
The machine would be a Gigabyte Aero 15x with a dedicated nvidia gfx card, and 8 gigs of ram.
What would you recommend me?
The choice of distro isn’t too important, you can usually run any software on any distro. The installation process varies a bit by distro because they use different package managers, but they generally all have all the software you need
The most important choice for the start is your desktop environment. I’m partial to KDE and can highly recommend it for linux beginners because it’s a lot like windows by default and extremely customizable. There are also XFCE (very light and fast, not too many features), Gnome (some people swear by it but it doesn’t let you customize much), cinnamon (no bullshit, fast and windows-like) and a bunch of others.
Then pick a distro based on that. The popular ones are usually also the best ones to start with, with one notable exception (in my opinion): Ubuntu.
It uses snaps, which are an alternative way to install software that’s made by canonical (the makers of ubuntu) and generally disliked among the linux community because it slows down application startup and causes very weird issues that are hard to figure out. Ubuntu will install some applications via snap instead of the package manager (which is apt for ubuntu) even if you specifically invoke apt instead of snap.
You can sti use it and probably be fine, but you’ll have to endure snap problems or go out of your way to avoid using it. Picking a different distro from the start is easier than that.
