What is thee best version of Linux to use with a Ryzen 5 RTX4060 machine that is mainly used for video editing and playing games from 5 years ago?
Microslop "Upgrade" me to windows 11 while I wasn't looking and I have never had a system crash this much, ever.
Thanks.
Hey
@BubbaRobot887, please do yourself a favour and
don't fucking listen to
@Taser Confetti's retarded Bazzite recommendation. At all. He's a low effort threadshitter recommending you a Linux distribution that's better if you wanna turn your PC into an appliance instead of actually using it like a normal person. I won't bore you with a gigantic screed of technobabble against Bazzite and the broader Fedora Atomic ecosystem, please consult
@Trans Fat 41g because he's inflicted it upon himself and can give you the granular, painstaking deep dive.
***
There are a few recommendations I have, but your RTX 4060
will ultimately be the big bottleneck. NVIDIA is such a shitty company to work with such that Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel,
publicly flipped them off. The drivers are adequate
now, but just remember: to use NVIDIA hardware on Linux necessarily means that you'll
have to roll your sleeves up and get your hands dirty. It's never a matter of "if," only "when," even on normie-friendly Linux distributions. I'm deliberately withholding technobabble because this is more for you to have a broad sense of what to try. If you have targeted questions, I'll gladly answer them.
FOR LINUX DISTRIBUTIONS THAT HANDLE NVIDIA OUT OF THE BOX
There are only two recommendations I have, and neither are entirely optimal. Highlighting their biggest pros (+), cons (-), and neutrals (~).
a)
LINUX MINT
(+) It is, without exaggeration or hyperbole, "the" starting point for *all* Linux noobs over the last 20 years. Its reputation precedes itself
for good reason.
COUNTLESS good reasons. This includes, but definitely ain't limited to how graphics drivers, proprietary/patented/encumbered hardware+software codecs, everything's pre-configured,.
(+) Clem, the project's leader, specifically prioritises conservatism and consistency. Frequent major changes
do not happen in Linux Mint. They would rather go out of their way to maintain older tooling at their own expense than to abandon newer stuff for the sake of making the developers' lives easier.
(+) Extremely low skill floor, more or less "indefinite" skill ceiling. Most newer Linux distros go out of their way to obfuscate the internals because they think the end user is a fucking retard who can't figure out how to do anything. Linux Mint gives you some nice graphical tools, but those tools map (almost) 1:1 with command line equivalents.
(+) Linux Mint itself, by virtue of being an
Ubuntu variant, is part of the broader
Debian family tree. All the fun proprietary software like Spotify, Chrome, most VPN clients, etc are Debian-forward. Furthermore, tons of fun homelab tooling (for when you decide to be a fancy guy) operate under Debian assumptions, most notably Docker Compose.
(-) The release cadence is
slow. Linux Mint is, in essence, a rebuild of Ubuntu's long term support branch. New releases of Ubuntu LTS drop every two years, and Linux Mint
never drops a new release immediately after. They heavily modify stuff in the process, and those modifications (while 100% justified) take a
long time.
(-) You're also running older versions of tons of other software. Not just the user applications you point and click with, but low-level system libraries and tooling too. You
can slot in third-party update repositories, but it gets really ugly and messy really quickly if you're chasing the latest kernel, Mesa (the non-driver low-level graphical stack), etc.
(-)
Newer hardware tends to be "iffy" on Linux Mint because they use older LTS kernels by default. This is a problem
I've personally encountered after building a new PC and finding out that my 9070XT is too damn new for Linux Mint 22 (released in 2024). It ain't just graphics cards, but other types of drivers and firmware affected by old kernels.
(~) You do have options to get newer kernels, and thus newer hardware to work on Linux Mint. Sometimes it works flawlessly, other times you win the battle but enter a nigh-unwinnable war because everything else except your kernel's outdated. I'm a stodgy old fart: either give me OOTB LTS kernel hardware support or I'll wait another two years. Other people ain't me, so who knows? Roll the dice at your own risk, but it
is an option that's better to have and not need than to need and not have.
b)
NOBARA
(+)
Significantly newer package base than Linux Mint. Again, not just the graphical user applications but also the low-level system libraries, utilities, and other such tooling. This is
on top of how graphics drivers, patented/proprietary/encumbered hardware+software codecs, and so on are shipped installed and preconfigured OOTB.
(+) This is very much applicable to your stated use case: Nobara itself is explicitly meant for "gaming, streaming, and content creation" (per the Nobara Project's home page). Without getting lost in the weeds of technobabble: this is pretty much plug and play in your case for
tons of reasons. Read the Nobara Project Wiki and see for yourself.
(+) This is a minor touch that I personally really love:
custom images for NVIDIA cards, and GloriousEggRoll (the project's creator and maintainer) has the decency to say "hey man, it ain't instant. Expect to twiddle your thumbs for a minute or two." I love that first boot disclosure. Spares you the anxiety of "is it borked?"
(-) Nobara is a heavily modified downstream rebuild of
Fedora Linux. Fedora is
not part of the Debian/Ubuntu lineage that Linux Mint descends from. Rather, Fedora is part of the Red Hat family tree with new releases every six months, each release only being supported for like 13 months tops. You
will be upgrading
frequently.
(-) Red Hat distros like Fedora don't have
as many proprietary goodies to screw around with. Yeah, you have Steam and Google Chrome but Spotify doesn't work OOTB (there is a workaround but it's not intuitive), and VPN clients are more hit/miss with Fedora support.
(-) There will come a time when you have to Google what "SELinux" is, and when it happens, you
will succumb to male pattern baldness out of pure frustration. That's just a Red Hat thing. Learn to live with it.
(~) Nobara is highly opinionated. GloriousEggRoll is remarkably transparent with the modifications he made, and also goes out of his way to say "oi m8 this shit was meant for me father and I. Use it if u want m8 but I ain't legally liable for crap if shit goes tits-up." I genuinely do appreciate that... but I'm also highly opinionated and many of Nobara's modifications irk me in that "too long-winded for a Linux distro recommendation post" sorta way. It's
great for
you, but "Really? You're doing it like X instead of Y? Why?!" for me.
