Distro choice

smogsy

smogsy

smogsy

Soldato
Joined
9 Dec 2006
Posts
9,287
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@ManCave
Hi all,

Looking for distribution suggestions.
been running Ubuntu budgie for last few days. I like it, but I find it feels "heavy" not in the sense of ram usage but the feel, possibly animations?

Here is what I am looking for hopefully you can helo

- fast, reliable and stable
- ideally quick releases from nvidia properitory stack.
- looks good, modern / minimalist
- not too much terminal requirement
-. I don't mind little but don't want daily terminal requirements to do the little things

Uses
General browsing
Steam / possibly some lutris
Programming / AI / automation
Multiple workspaces


pc spec
2950x 16 cores
32GB 3600
3x nvme Samsung 970 evos
1080ti

(basically run anything)

I was thinking maybe manjaro? But open to suggestions. On distro and dwm environment.

Just want to get stuff done and feel snappy!
 
Budgie is actually one of the lighter DEs - and with a 2950X, 32GB RAM and an nVME?... Pull the other one. :p Did you try disabling animations in Budgie Settings? It does make it feel faster for no discernable loss. Otherwise if you like Budgie then it's 'official' distro, Solus, is worth a look. It's developed by the guy who worked on Intel's Clear Linux, i.e. he knows how to make things impossibly fast and he ported all the tweaks/configs for speed to Solus. It also has Steam available.

Otherwise it's personal choice. KDE is lean and nippy these days, and even Gnome3 feels relatively light. It (Gnome) does cache a lot and *appears* to be using more RAM than most because of that cache - about 1.5GB - but it's faster for it. Esepecially, again if you disable animations (use gnome-tweaks).

I run Arch, which is lean by nature; but Angertos is worth a look too (Arch based). Generally, and arguably, the 'heaviness' would go something like:

no WM/DE > LxDE > XFCE > Mate > Budgie > Plasma 5 (KDE) > Gnome3

Distro does play a part though. Arch, Debian or Fedora will always feel snappier and lighter than *buntu ime, especially now the latter is shipping half its apps as Snaps.
 
Another vote for Neon. There are some desktop effects enabled by default but you can choose to switch some or all of them off if you like.
 
Your rig will run any linux distro without breaking a sweat...

My recommendations are:

Mint Cinnamon 19.1 - (https://linuxmint.com/) for a nice comfy LTS release..

Solus - https://getsol.us/home/ for a more modern up to date rolling release..

or for decent bare bones snappiness you can't go far wrong with Xubuntu XFCE - https://xubuntu.org/

no idea about nVidia specifically, but I imagine the drivers are all the same no matter what the distro?
 
If I remember correctly the nVidia drivers under Mint can be i stalled by choosing the proprietary drivers. I think that's an option during installation and also later from the menu.

With nVidia the proprietary drivers are better than the open source ones. But with AMD the open source drivers built into the kernel are the best ones to go for (AMD open source drivers get installed automatically when installing Linux which is one reason I prefer AMD nowadays).
 
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