I am in the process of building my own PC. Nothing fancy, just something that is much more powerful than the old PC I currently have. I’ve been using Linux on my laptop for a few years now (KDE Neon), and I’m very happy with it, I would like to put Linux on my next PC, but I have my doubts…
I don’t know if I should stay with the distro I already use or if there is one that better suits my needs.
On the one hand, I’m a graphic designer but I’ve been using only FOSS for many years, I only use Adobe in the office (reluctantly). On the other hand, I have seen that thanks to Steam with Proton gaming on linux is getting better and better. What I don’t know is if SteamOS can be good not only for gaming.
I would like to know if there is a distro that works well both for gaming and designing using FOSS (like Krita, Inkscape, KDEnlive, etc) or if it’s ok to stick with KDE Neon.
Pop_OS! is touted as being designed around gaming and creative purposes. I use it as a daily driver and can’t complain, it plays nicely with whatever I throw at it gaming wise.
I tried Pop about 6-8 months ago and had lots of trouble with the nvidia drivers on it (and, subsequently, ubuntu and mint) with a bog-standard RTX3060. Pop’s particular issue was that whenever I tried to update the video driver, no matter which version I used (except closed-source 555-server, for whatever reason) it hard-locked my system and on reboot had reverted back to the default video driver (so my 40" ultrawide screen was trying to do like 1024x768 and shit). I have since tried 2 seperate Ubuntu installs (LTS and non-LTS) and Mint in the last month, and all of them refused to even initialize the GPU. So, just a heads up for folks with nvidia cards, Ubuntu-based distros might give you trouble. Fortunately Nobara 42 (fedora) is working great.