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.
I’d advocate for Bazzite too as you mentioned you just want a start and go machine. With DAWS you’ve also got Ardour and Bitwig both have great compatibility and flathub. There’s also vcv and a few other great tools for music creation.
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.just choose something that’s been around for a while, e.g. debian, opensuse, fedora, etc
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.
So I’m a sceptic when it comes to immutable desktops. What you gain in stability you sacrifice in flexibility and control. If you want to use software outside of Flatpak and your distros repos, immutable can be very annoying to work around.
If you want more control and flexibility, a standard install with a Long Term Support distro will be fine. I use OpenSuSE Tumbleweed; I wouldn’t recommend that as it’s a rolling distro but I would recommend OpenSuSE Leap the point release distro. It has good user tools in YaST, it’s secure and it’s reliable, and it has a sensible update schedule. It is also a decent distro for coding. It has multiple versions of Python available which I believe are configured to coexist well, deliberately to make coding and version control easier.
I’d avoid anything directly Ubuntu related due to the reliance on Snap. But Linux Mint is a good variant which has loads of support available online if you want to ease back into Linux. Make no mistake, although it’s user friendly, it’s a full distro and capable of being as powerful as you want.
If you really do want to go down the immutable route, then probably Fedora Silver blue and variants is the way to go at the moment. I second the Kaionite recommendation - KDE is great. It’s well established and popular in the space, so there will more support out there should issues arise (most commonly installing something not in the repos and not on Flatpak). Immutable distros from other big names aren’t really there yet in terms of the user base as far as I’m aware.
Thanks for the POV. Mint I tried back when it was step up from Damn Small Linux, like early 2000’s, no clue how it is now. I’ll keep it in mind.
I got interested in the immutable concept, since it wasn’t a thing back when I was more of a linux user, and I’ve gotten lazy and burnt out on fixing my OS when I just want to do something fun. But you do make a good point of sacrificing flexibility, and I might get annoyed at that later.
Yeah I totally understand that, I’ve played around with immutable distros inside virtual machines and they’re interesting. Also if you like tinkering, Linux is a great OS.
If you do go immutable have a play with KVM - Kernel Virtual Machines - they’re easy to set up and give near native speeds for guest virtual Linux machines (or decent performance for other OS like Windows) It’s a great way to play with Linux inside a sandbox while keeping your host clear; but also a very useful way to run custom software in a flexible Linux guest while on an immutable desktop. E.g. Create a Mint VM to run something that’d be a pain to set up on Silverblue.
Immutable desktop plus KVM guests might be the best of both worlds. Even if you don’t end up on immutable distro, KVM is cool tech that has really advanced in the last few years. It’s better and more powerful than VirtualBox imo, and I use it a lot even on my rolling release distro (I have a VM to run work Microsoft Office, plus a few Linux VMs for a torrent stack and just for tinkering).
Oh yeah, I was thinking about that today, too; get a “for most stuff” distro as the baremetal, and VM specialist distros (like Kali or something) on top of it when needed.
I will definitely check out KVM at some point! I was just gonna chuck VBox at it, but your salespitch convinced me to try at it. Been mostly working with Azure and ESXi for the past 10 years, had no idea KVM was so advanced now, I saw something about it back in the day, but it was a tech demo -level back then.
Thank you kindly for the insight!
Fedora.
Fedora Kinoite. It’s an immutable version of their KDE Plasma desktop edition
Cheers mate, never even heard of Kinoite, I was looking at KDE Plasma, but had some annoyance about it, can’t remember what. I’ll look into it for sure.
I would say, that Fedora and Debian are mostly care-free if you go with the defaults. Fedora can enable Flatpak as part of the installation and for Debian the installation guide can be found on Flathub. In both cases you can then install packages using gnome-software.
I have edited videos with Blender, it has a video editor built-in which is very intuitive. And you can explore compositing with it later. Text and graphics for videos I created with Inkscape (export them to PNGs). The graphics are just linked, so if you need to correct a spelling mistake in Inkscape you can overwrite the original PNG and Blender will pick it up. I think with Blender you can use all video codecs that are supported by ffmpeg.
For music you can have a look at Ardour. I did not use it in a long time, but previous version were enough for me to master a track.
Games: Just install Steam through Flatpak (gnome-software). But it depends mostly on the game whether it will be playable on Linux; check protondb.
Thanks for the alternative take. Good to know that Fedora supports Flatpak that easily.
Blender has a video editor?! Geez, used it back in the day for 3D rendering, but didn’t even cross my mind for videos. Inkscape is a great idea!
Had a couple of recommendations for Ardour from other folks as well, will have to give it a go. Free is free after all.
Games fortunately I have the most experience with lately, was in another country with my ancient T530, and was bored, so did some gaming on Ubuntu, got mostly everything working pretty quickly.
Blender has a video editor?! Geez, used it back in the day for 3D rendering, but didn’t even cross my mind for videos.
it is surprisingly good, when i first found out about it i was kinda blown away with how competitive it is with stuff like Kdenlive and the ancient version of sony vegas i used to use
For the music stuff, there’s also Bitwig and Ardour for good DAWs, Ardour’s free so that’s what I use. There’s yabridge for VSTs, though it’s hit and miss, and might be more tinkering than you want as you have to use an older version of wine. I’ve also heard about using carla for this purpose, but I haven’t messed around with that so I can’t attest to it’s usefulness. I use Arch for all this, so ymmv on Kinoite, I didn’t try any of it out when I was on Bazzite, but I can tell you that Bazzite was great for gaming!
Cheers for the music points. I got some pointers, that Nobara is great for music stuff, and Bazzite can be optimized for it, but takes some effort and fiddling. I gotta take a look at Ardour and Bitwig, see if I vibe with them. How are they with older (my keyboard is around 2010 I believe) MIDI devices, do you happen to have experience?
I don’t, unfortunately, I’m a guitarist primarily. I did see some MIDI stuff in the menus though, so I think it’d be fine? I think it’d probably depend on drivers, so you’d probably have to check if your device has Linux support, if it’s not just taken care of by the generic drivers. You might ask on linuxmusicians.com, they’re a great resource!
Thanks for the suggestion, bookmarked, will have a gander if I get stuck!
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.
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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.
Does the dickish attitude come with the package or is it extra? So sorry for asking questions after being out the scene for a bit, glad to see nothing’s changed in the past 20 years.
There’s always one. Twenty years ago, or today, there’s always one.
Hey <your community here> - I would like to get into your hobby and have done literally no research about it - which is the best <thing> to get to start with?
<hundreds of contradictory and useless responses>
Does the dickish attitude come with the package or is it extra?
It’s free, just for you.
Your question was bad and you got bad answers. What did you expect?
You know one of your options is just to ignore the post, right?
Did op know one of their options was to not post a stupid question?
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!
