So sitrep:
Newish desktop
- i7-13700K
- 64Gb DDR5 6000Mhz
- RTX 3070Ti
- MSI PRO Z790-P (WiFi is not a factor, permanent ethernet connection.)
Needs:
- Gaming
- Music composing
- Coding (Mostly python)
- Video editing
I’ve been using Linux on and off throughout the years, but lately I’ve fallen out of the loop somewhat. Started with Slackware around 1998, Kubuntu in the 2000’s, Ubuntu 2010’s, Kali and Mandrake 2020’s -> on my laptop, Ubuntu server on my RasPi. At work, we have a few Fedora servers I have to maintain. So not a complete novice, but somewhat obsolete info.
I have been looking at the immutable distros, like Bazzite and Pop!_OS as I’ve done the whole song and dance of constantly repairing my distro because of various issues, and I’d like my main recreational machine & distro to be low maintenance, I get to fix linux servers at work enough already, I don’t want to bring that home.
With gaming, I’ve understood that linux has come a loooooong way since I last tried sometime around TBC Launch for WoW when Wine barely worked with it.
Music composing is a little annoying, since apparently both Ableton and FL studio are not an option. I’ve heard good things about Reaper, but I’ll have to do some more research. Feel free to educate me on this topic if you have some insider info. I don’t play live sets, just compose and mix.
Video editing, currently I use Davinci Resolve, and apparently it works fine on Linux, just some limitations and shenanigans with codecs. Alternatives are welcome, I don’t need 90% of what resolve offers, I can make do with a simpler software as well.
Thank you kindly in advance for departing thine wisdom.
EDIT: Ended up installing Bazzite, and KVM virtualizing OpenSuse Tumbleweed and vanilla Fedora, keeping my backups for now on the NAS so I will be able to easily nuke & go with Tumbleweed (I think) next, since so many people seem to swear by it. Thank you everyone for the great advice!
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Thank me later, just as I did to a guy that suggested it to me.
Throw a dart, pick a distro. My God these “help me pick a distro” posts are irritating. You’re not special. Your usecase is not special. Distros are “similar but different”.
What do you use at work? Use that one.
What always gets me is recommendations for what seem like weird obscure distros that I’ve never heard of.
What should I use for gaming? Well, for that you need Fizzlegit! It was released in 2025, is a derivative of a derivative of a derivative, and uses the same repos, but it has Steam preinstalled. Its totally next-gen!
arch.
though honestly the distro doesn’t matter that much, as long as it supports the majority of your software stack. almost everything is in the big distros (arch fedora Debian), so just pick whatever ur most comfortable with…
i must say I like the rolling release of arch. and the fact that it’s very up to date…
Sorry mate, not what I’m looking for.
I’d like my main recreational machine & distro to be low maintenance, I get to fix linux servers at work enough already, I don’t want to bring that home.
in that case you can grab any of the other distros that are Arch-based, EndeavourOS/Garuda/CachyOS and so on. You will get the benefits of rolling-release like fresh-er software without the need to setup & configure it yourself.
You will get all the maintenance headache of Arch in a nice looking package. Absolutely not what OP asks for.
Arch is never “set it and forget it”.
Especially since, if you don’t update your system regularly enough it might break and you will have problems with upgrading.
And a whole lot of other issues that can happen on arch btw now that i think about it
I’ll suggest opensuse tumbleweed, CachyOS or Fedora Everything works on them but you should know that there are lot of cool tools are coming up recently on Linux. Like LACT and alot more.
If your primary usecase is going to be music (so a need for realtime capabilities for stuff like recording, VSTs and DAWs) then I do not reccomend immutable distros for a simple reason: you will probably/eventually need to hack something up to get it to work and at that moment, the immutability is just extra work.
As far as I have tried fiddling with the music stack on Linux (which is not that much), the whole pipewire/JACK/carla stack is a bit messy and I can’t imagine it working with flatpacks due to the sandboxing/permissions.
Aye, audio latency was a big question I didn’t find a good answer for during my research period. It is a headache on Windows as well.
You do make a really good point I didn’t think about the immutables for music stuff. Cheers for that.
Check out the Arch wiki page for Professional Audio, it’s got some great distro-agnostic tips for reducing latency.
Flatpak still uses PulseAudio I believe. You really want Pipewire.
Honestly, Bazzite seems to fit like a glove:
- RTX 3070Ti
Nvidia can be an ass to work with on a lot of distros, but Bazzite delivers the right drivers OOTB.
Needs:
- Gaming
Bazzite is setup for gaming OOTB; it’s bundled with Steam and Lutris, makes use of custom kernels/schedulers to optimize performance for gaming and contains many other goodies like excellent controller/peripheral support.
- Coding (Mostly python)
Provides a specialized DX (i.e. Developer Experience) image that comes with all the goodies you might expect.
- Video editing
Has a built-in
justscript that downloads, installs and sets up Davinci Resolve for ya:ujust install-resolve- Music composing
This is the only I’m not 100% sure yet because you haven’t provided explicitly yet what you’d like to use. But, I can’t image it would be harder to get this running on Bazzite compared to other distros.
And last, but not least:
I’d like my main recreational machine & distro to be low maintenance
Through utilizing the
bootcmodel, Bazzite is as low maintenance as they come.
