Planning on moving over from Windows 10 to Linux for my Personal Work Station. Can't decide which OS I should switch to.

Mint is the typical way to get a more up-to-date Debian and if you have something against Ubuntu. This community is pretty anti-Canonical so they'll never recommend Ubuntu...

Manjaro should not even be considered in the modern distro landscape, the story of manjaro is just a series of incompetent mistakes.

Don't pick a distro, pick a desktop environment. Look up KDE Plasma, gnome, cinnamon, xfce, etc. Then pick the largest most stable distro that uses that environment.

Do not use Manjaro. It is a known trap. What you can do is install pamac, which is what Manjaro uses for GUI package management. It's been a hot minute since I've used Arch, so here's a tutorial:

https://itsfoss.com/install-pamac-arch-linux/

Alternatively you could look at Garuda, which is a solid Arch distro. You'll either love or hate the theme, but that's easy to change. It also comes with an interactive kernel by default (most distros use a regular kernel build, which works better for servers).

Whatever you do, please please please not Ubuntu. It's the lowest common denominator. Emphasis on "lowest". It was good in the past, but Canonical have really lost the plot.

I feel like I should throw in a good word for Fedora. I run a combination of dnf and flatpak, and have a grand time, and am doing an IT diploma program aimed very solidly at Windows under Fedora. I've used Ubuntu, Mint, and Manjaro, and landed on Fedora for my desktop experience.

I mean EndeavorOS can install the same gui package manager as Manjaro has, pamac.
Game support usually comes from using packages you need and those packages being up to date to support latest changes like fixes.

Am a long time EndeavourOs user, quite happy, it allows everything i need and pacman never broke on me.. cant say the same about apt, when using non-standard repositories (for some up to date packages)
And the AUR is awesome. Has many packages not found in the normal repositories, just some have to be compiled which can take a bit of time, but i dont have to fiddle with it.

I should point out that openSUSE also uses btrfs. I feel I should also point out that that neither it or Fedora has to be installed on btrfs.

I use Fedora Kinoite myself

You'll have the die-hard "XX is the best distros" and the "distros are irrelevant, choose a DE" answers here. The reality is that it will all boil down to your hardware, use case and willingness to tinker, in that same order.

For example, I love PopOS for laptops with Nvidia cards, only because I am used to the Cosmic version of Gnome PopOS has used all these years (looking forward to the proper Cosmic DE once its out), but for PC (regardless of GPU) I'd rather use Fedora KDE (customized to a Gnome feel) because I find it easy to customize to a very granular degree, and I feel Fedora has the best mix of cutting edge + stability.

As you can see, there's a whole lot of "I" in my comment. That's the beauty of Linux, whatever you end up sticking with, you get to make it as YOURS as you want it to be.

Arch derived distros require more carefully maintenance than most other base distros (RHEL and Debian), but are also great to actually learn Linux more deeply. RHEL derived distros, IMO, are a better balance between "it just works" and "I can make this happen", and Debian based are the easiest to maintain, mainly because it tends to be what the most popular distros out there are based on, which makes for a much larger community for when we hit a brick wall (when, not if).

Bottom line is that I believe you would be better off going the route you mentioned, and going through the pitfalls of each until you find that sweet spot.

And of course, once you're on that road, come and ask anything you want, most of us are always happy to help if we can.

So the opinions of those of you who’ve used Davinci Resolve, Unity/Godot, and/or FreeCAD

Search for those packages in distro repos, and check if they're available through some alternative pm like flatpak. If you need them fresh, and there's no alternative, you can discard centos and debian. If there are, I'd suggest MX (debian).

An over reliance on the terminal to fix simple problems

The closer you're to the bleeding edge, the more you'll need to use the terminal to fix simple problems. For me, debian and mint never crashed or failed to boot, arch on the hand...

Debain (alt Linux Mint DE) Pro: The most stable OS I’ve used, with a wide range of software support both officially in the distros package manager, or from developers own website. I am most familiar with this OS and APT Cons: Ancient packages which may cause issues with Davinci Resolve and Video Games

I don't use Davinci Resolve but I do play videogames, I build my own desktop for it and I use Linux MX (Debian), it's rock solid.

"Ancient packages" are not a problem with backports, there are also flatpacks if some backports are not enough for you, or DEB packages directly from software developers (I manually install a couple of those).

The only games you will have problems with are those implementing invasive DRM, but that's not a "Debian" problem, Linux in general doesn't support that kind of DRM (not yet at least), tho I personally don't mind since I think DRM is stupid and I've always tried to avoid it.

Another vote for Debian stable with backports and flatpaks. I don't really have an issue with outdated software, and I really like "apt", maybe because I'm so used to it as this point. I've been running mainly Debian for 12+ years now.

My second choice for personal use would be Arch Linux. I had very good experience with it back in the day and their wiki is fantastic. But I'm too comfortable with the simplicity and stability of Debian at this point.

At work I use Ubuntu because everyone else uses it. It's not too bad. I just ignore all the crap I don't like (like snaps).

I had the same apprehensions as you against using a CLI package manager, but I have to say it's grown on me. I used Debian based OSes for 5-10 years and I swore by Synaptic.

After only a short while with Endeavour though, I found that I was perfectly happy to run sudo pacman -Ss to search for software — or yay for the AUR. It's been my daily driver for a couple of years now.

I would go with Fedora or Mint, both for their software support and stability. Personally I like Mint over Fedora, I think it has a larger selection of software packages but I could be wrong.

Btrfs is more stable nowadays, I wouldn't worry about that. And anyway you can choose XFS or Ext4 during installation while setting up your disk partitions.

If you are worried about a particular software package being too old, try installing FlatPaks instead, or use the Nix or Guix package managers which can co-exist easily with any other package manager.

I’m just gonna say, go with something Debian based. MX Linux is very solid.

I was a happy Ubuntu user for more than a decade and I agree that it's a good beginners distro. I am now using Manjaro, which is also very good. In fact, Manjaro might even be more beginner friendly because it support Flatpak out of the box.

EndevourOS (alt Manjaro) Cons: Manjaro has died on me once, and is a hassle to setup right and keep up. EndevourOS has no Package Manager GUI, and is over reliant on the Terminal. Can’t use pacman in a terminal the commands are confusing.

I hear this and I highly recommend Bauh. Its a GUI package manager that supports Arch, AUR, Flatpak and Snaps. Will even automatically generate snapshots in Timeshift before you update. Super easy to use. I can't recommend it enough, I use it on all my desktops.

Manjaro has also died on me in the past, because they fuck with the packages, EndeavorOs is rock solid and you will thank yourself when you can install stuff like spotify, discord, teamspeak with a single yay command

Pop_OS is a good choice for a gaming machine, it was perfect for like 4 years until I upgraded my 1080TI for a 7900XTX and the Mesa version was too old to run it at the time so I switched to Manjaro.

Personally I hate most Arch based distros with a burning passion. Like I have used arch wiki to install Arch at least 3 times after it had shit the bed during an update. Now if I need to open a terminal to install a distro I'm not installing it. I just wish the people maintaining Manjaro weren't so incompetent and also include common codecs (h264 and h265) in Mesa like every other distro.

If you are using this pc for work I'd guess you want the most stable system possible. Just pick Debian stable with backports, stick with the official repo + flatpak and you won't have it fail on you unexpectedly ever.

If you need DaVinci Resolve, just know that when you switch to Linux, you will lose the ability to read and render mp4 files. You will need to buy the full version to be able to do this on Linux.

I use my desktop primarily for video editing, 3D modeling, and a bit of gaming, and it's been running Pop!_OS since December with absolutely zero issues. The only annoyance has been the mp4 file thing in DaVinci.

Choice of distro isn't as important anymore as it used to be in the past. There's containerization and distro-independent packaging like Flatpak or AppImage. Also, most somewhat popular distors can be made to run anything, even things packaged for other distros. Sure, you can make things easier for yourself choosing the right distro for the right use case, but that's unfortunately a process you need to go through yourself.

Generally, there's 3 main "lines" of popular Linux distros: RedHat/SuSE (counting them together because they use the same packaging format RPM), Debian/Ubuntu, and Arch. Fedora and OpenSuSE are derived from RedHat and SuSE respectively, Ubuntu is derived from Debian but also stands on its own feet nowadays (although both will always be very similar), Mint and Pop!OS are both derived from Ubuntu so will always be similar to Ubuntu and Debian as well), and Endeavour is derived from Arch.

I'd recommend using Fedora if you don't like to tinker much, otherwise use Arch or Debian. You can't go wrong with any of those three, they've been around forever and they are rock solid with either strong community backing or both strong community and company backing in the case of Fedora. Debian is, depending on edition, less up to date than the other two, but still a rock solid distro that can be made more current by using either the testing or unstable edition and/or by installing backports and community-made up to date packages. It's more work to keep it updated of course. Don't be misled by Debian's labels - Debian testing at least is as stable as any other distro.

Ubuntu is decent, just suffers from some questionable Canonical decisions which make it less popular among veterans. Still a great alternative to Debian, if you're hesitant about Debian because of its software version issues, but still want something very much alike Debian. It's more current than Debian, but not as current as a rolling or semi-rolling release distro such as Arch or Fedora.

OpenSuSE is probably similar in spirit and background to Fedora, but less popular overall, and that's a minus because you'll find less distro-specific help for it then. Still maybe a "hidden gem" - whenever I read about it, it's always positive.

Endeavour is an alternative to Arch, if pure Arch is too "hard" or too much work. It's probably the best "Easy Arch-based" distro out of all of them. Not counting some niche stuff like Arco etc.

Mint is generally also very solid and very easy, like Ubuntu, but probably better. If you want to go the Ubuntu route but don't like Ubuntu that much, check out Mint. It's one of the best newbie-friendly distros because it's very easy to use and has GUI programs for everything.

Pop!OS is another Ubuntu/Mint-like alternative, very current as well.

For gaming and new-ish hardware support, I'd say Arch, Fedora or Pop!OS (and more generally, rolling / semi-rolling release distros) are best suited.

Well that's about it for the most popular distros.

You sound like you'd be pretty capable, I personally use arch, less perceived limitations. Endeavour is the better choice between endeavour and manjaro.

MX if you just want a os with beautiful theming.

Either way good luck.

It doesn't matter that much, but I like Arch... it's a bit of a pain to install if you are new to Linux though. I find it more stable than Manjaro though.

Your decision probably should depend on if you like KDE or Gnome and if you want the latest software or something a bit more stable.

You could also try the live version first before you install it to make sure everything works as intended.

I wrote a Linux/Windows guide which covers basically everything. https://lemmy.ml/post/511377

Start with Ubuntu LTS, chock full of general software/game support and online support community, without the need to interact with toxic Linux community people. This is a key factor that goes unspoken. You will have a fun time using Linux, and learn Linux things so that you can migrate to something better like Debian after a few years.

I’m using EndeavourOS and I use DaVinci Resolve. The only issue I’ve had is a strange bug in DaVinci 18.6.x where my footage will start flickering after a few minutes.

I shoot in SLOG3. The flickering looks like my colour grade flashing on and off for a frame or two. It will persist until I turn off all of my colour nodes, save and quit, open Resolve again, and turn on the nodes again.

I haven’t figured out what is causing it yet.

I've tried Ubuntu and pop_OS but had problems with them. But I've just installed Mint Debian edition and it's been going great so far

This Lemmy BBQ has been the most entertaining yet... First off, now that the drunk uncles are finally showing up and the conversation has meandered away from OP's original question, I would like to say thank you OP - I was stoked to find your retro-gaming youtube. So good man!

The next bit of entertainment are the aforementioned drunk uncles scrapping it out on the lawn mid-post. Who has the bitchin'est Camaro? Nevermind that for a moment. Did Uncle Vinnie and Uncle Scotty say their FIREBIRDS are the bitchin'est? Fuck those guys! Linus from the Linus Tuner Garage out on the coast at 138 Richmond and Main said he busted the shit out of the Firebird dashboard that one time. Nah man, that was a Civic, but whatever, Firebirds blow. Pontiac is a shitty company anyway. Um, aren't they all GM. Yeah, but Firebirds have that shitty design on the hood and crap aftermarket support.

Why don't we all just sit around the Grill. Pick your steak, have a beer...

And thank fuck we aren't using Windows 11

You already know why you should pick Debian:

Pro: The most stable OS I’ve used

About your "ancient packages" that's an easy fix, just install all your software using Flatpak/Flathub and you'll get the latest software on your rock solid base system.

Cannot say for other programs you mentioned (although I'm sure they work fine as well) I'm using Godot on EndeavourOS and it is perfect. If your only concern is terminal, EndeavourOS has built-in scripts for updating your system. Also using an AUR helper would make your tasks easier, which "yay" is pre-installed. You can basically type "yay package_name" and it will guide you.

I wouldn't recommend any of those. Since you have Nvidia go with Linux Mint or Pop os as they both have good support for Nvidia.

If you are using davinci on your system a lot, you can try their pre-packaged iso. They recommend rocky Linux nowadays and also provide an iso for it.

Gotta throw my vote in for tumbleweed. Its IMO the best distro to get the latest packages while still maintaining stability. Their built in roll back feature is great.

Software not being well supported is kinda a sticking point. Though honestly its becoming less and less of an issue each day. Flatpaks are available for almost everything, distrobox covers the rest. I really haven't run into any situation that prevented me from doing what I wanted. I've been using it for a few years now across my desktop, laptop, and my computer at work. Suse is enterprise Linux after all, its still got great support

If you are interested in something arch-based but like having guis for stuff, I highly recommend Garuda Linux. I've been using it for about a year on my everyday desktop for gaming and it's been great. I also have really liked fedora bazzite on my laptop for almost the same time period.

I'd stay away from manjaro, I wouldn't touch it again with a 10 foot pole. Every time I've tried to use it, it just breaks itself every 3-6 months. I know some people swear by it, but I just have to assume they either have extreme tier knowledge to prevent trouble before it starts, are so used to fixing problems they are blind to their time spent doing it, or they are just incredibly lucky.

I was once in the same boat. Here is what I did, put a second drive into my PC and separated my root and home partitions then kept hopping distros until I found the one that worked for me. That way, I didn't lose my important files while hopping. The distro I landed on was endeavour OS. I have been using it for 3 years now. Not suggesting that you should use it, because every distro works differently for different people depending on many factors. But try this and see if you find your own endeavour OS. Good luck :)

debian stable with backports and flatpaks will get you up to date software and a very stable base

I think an important consideration is which desktop environment you want to use as you're more likely to get better graphics support with a distro that defaults to your favourite de.

I used to use Mint, but I recently switched to OpenSuSE as I have decided I prefer using KDE. I could install KDE in Mint but I had a few graphical glitches and annoyances with it's apps being designed for cinnamon/gtk. Meanwhile no issues with OpenSuSE. I also have an Nvidia card and AMD CPU.

The other thing to consider given your graphics needs is a more gaming focused distro. I use Nobara on my living room PC which I use for gaming; it's pretty good although that machine is an AMD iGPU. I have considered moving that to OpenSuSE for consistency with my desktop but I like it as it is tbh.

I tried Mamjaro in the recent past - it's nice but I didn't like the Arch packaging system. The AUR is good but I've found everything I want via other routes on other systems, and Mamjaro failed on me soon after I started using it. May have been coincidence buf I decided I couldn't use a system like that - I just didn't want to be problem solving so much on my daily driver.

I've also tried Fedora. I really didn't like that system - again it was the package management system and the BTRFS file system caused me endless issues.

I like OpenSuSE's Yast and Zypper package management tools. I also like the debian Apt package management system.

Last consideration: Debian systems have a lot of support available due to it being the base to lots of derivatives like Ubuntu and it's own derivatives like Mint etc. OpenSuSE has less of that generic support - it's there but it's not the same scale, ubiquitous support.

Imo go straight to archlinux. With Archinstall it is significantly less work than people say, I got mine working in less than an hour, with minimal issues. I was on Manjaro for a while and loved the experience, shame about the issues they have. EndeavourOS seems alright but i had issues with the live image (no wifi)

I use Opensuse leap. It works for me. If i cant find software i want i use the nix package manager

you want debian and snaps/flatpacks/appimages/containers or whatever for the stuff that's not in backports or needs to be updated too frequently (yt-dlp).

when i left slackware i tried all the distros, and had all the complaints you have about debian. why should i have to deal with an out of date package when slackware let me convert rpms to tgzs and install them willy-nilly? turns out i can do that with debian just fine.

walk that road though, you gotta travel far to get home.

Mint DE. Enable backports or whatever if you want to. Get a newer kernel. I'm on 6.1

You can use my post as reference and guide: https://feddit.de/post/9087676

I would also recommend checking out Distrobox, especially for DaVinci Resolve. This decouples your programs from the host OS, which allows you to run DVR on any distro and get the newest software, containerised on Debian for example.

I personally am a huge fan of Fedora Atomic, especially uBlue. It's almost the same as regular Fedora, but way more reliable and with a new concept in mind. uBlue already has Distrobox pre-installed.

Use the AppImage for FreeCAD, it will probably have the best performance. You can try Flatpak if you want and compare but definitely not the snap.

Davinci Resolve will depend on the graphics drivers. If you have Nvidia you should be good to go, just pick a distro that has excellent integration with Nvidia drivers with zero fuss and tinkering.

Godot is Linux native software so I imagine it will work great on any distro, but keep in mind having recent enough packages for it.

sorry if i might repeat someones answer, i did not read everything.

it seems you want it for "work" that assumes that stability and maybe something like LTS is dort of the way to go. This also assumes older but stable packages. maybe better choose a distro that separates new features from bugfixes, this removes most of the hassle that comes with rolling release (like every single bugfix comes with two more new bugs, one removal/incompatible change of a feature that you relied on and at least one feature that cripples stability or performance whilst you cannot deactivate it... yet...)

likely there is at least some software you most likely want to update out of regular package repos, like i did for years with chromium, firefox and thunderbird using some shellscript that compared current version with latest remote to download and unpack it if needed.

however maybe some things NEED a newer system than you currently have, thus if you need such software, maybe consider to run something in VMs maybe using ssh and X11 forwarding (oh my, i still don't use/need wayland *haha)

as for me, i like to have some things shared anyway like my emails on an IMAP store accessible from my mobile devices and some files synced across devices using nextcloud. maybe think outside the box from the beginning. no arch-like OS gives you the stability that the already years-long-hung things like debian redhat/centos offer, but be aware that some OSes might suddenly change to rolling release (like centos i believe) or include rolling-release software made by third parties without respecting their own rules about unstable/testing/stable branches and thus might cripple their stability by such decisions. better stay up to date if what you update to really is what you want.

but for stability (like at work) there is nothing more practical than ancient packages that still get security fixes.

roundabout the last 15 years or more i only reinstalled my workstation or laptop for:

• hardware problems, mostly aged disk like ssd wearlevel down (while recovery from backup or direct syncing is not reinstalling right?)
• OS becomes EOL. thats it.

if you choose to run servers and services like imap and/or nextcloud, there is some gain in quickly switching the workstation without having to clone/copy everything but only place some configs there and you're done.

A multi-OS setup is more likely to cover "all" needs while tools like x2vnc exist and can be very handy then, i nearly forgot that i was working on two very different systems, when i had such a setup.

I would suggest to make recovery easy, maybe put everything on a raid1 and make sure you have on offsite and an offline backup with snapshots, so in case of something breaks you just need to replace hardware. thats the stability i want for the tools i work with at least.

if you want to use a rolling release OS for something work related i would suggest to make sure no one externally (their repo, package manager etc) could ever prevent you from reinstalling that exact version you had at that exact point in time (snapshots from repos install media etc). then put everything in something like ansible and try out that reapplying old snapshots is straight forward for you, then (and not earlier) i would suggest that those OSes are ok for something you consider to be as important as "work". i tried arch linux at a time when they already stopped supporting the old installer while the "new" installer wasn't yet ready at all for use, thus i never really got into longterm use of archlinux for something i rely on, bcause i could'nt even install the second machine with the then broken install procedure *haha

i believe one should consider to NOT tinker too much on the workstation. having to fix something you personally broke "before" beeing able to work on sth important is the opposite of awesome. better have a second machine instead, swappable harddrive or use VMs.

The exact OS is IMHO not important, i personally use devuan as it is not affected by some instability annoyances that are present in ubuntu and probably some more distros that use that same software. at work we monitor some of those bugs of that software. within ubuntu cause it creates extra hassle and we workaround those so its mostly just a buggy annoying thing visible in monitoring.

I dont get the "alt" do you want CentOS (which doesnt exist, but I think Stream is better anyways) or Fedora?

Run Davinci resolve in a container, no internet access maybe, fixed dependencies that dont update. Ublue has a container image that you can run with podman.

Choose the OS you want and then use Distrobox to create a CentOS or Fedora environment for Resolve. It will see all the packages it likes.

Absolutely do not use Manjaro.

My favourite on your list is EndeavourOS. You can use pacseek to manage your packages if you really hate pacman ( though you should be use yay on EOS anyway ). If your really want a GUI, use yay to install pamac ( yay -S pamac or yay -S pamac-gtk probably — I cannot remember the package name and I am on my phone ).

If you like Debian, use Debian. The packages in Debian 12 are not old yet. Regardless, the package problem is solved by Distrobox.

I have debated using Debian as a base with access to Arch packages via distrobox myself. I may try VanillaOS for that. You would need to pick a different package source if you do not like the pacman commands.

What DE do you order? An alternative to Debian would be LMDE. That gives you the Debian stability and compatibility with some of the friendliness of Linux Mint and a more up-to-date desktop.

"dnf -C ..." may change your life!

Maybe look into Garuda as an additional alternative to EndeavousOS and Manjaro. I'm using it on a gaming rog and haven't had any significant issues regarding stability.

My recommendation would be Fedora or CentOS if you want a stable workstation you won't have to reinstall. Debian is also a great choice. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is okay but I found it a little clunky compared to the others. Avoid EndevourOS and Manjaro like the plague.

It's some work and will take some learning, but perhaps NixOS.