Best distro for me?
I've played with Linux before and finally had enough with Windows. I'm a seasoned programmer but mainly concerned with gaming for this computer, except that I want to be able to run Unreal Engine 5 and potentially other big tools like that. TIA ๐
For gaming, Bazzite is the best, most hands off, set and forget distro I have tried. I would really recommend Bazzite.
Not sure if it runs Unreal Engine 5, but it has Lutris installed and configured by default, so if it is as other commenters claim, you should be good.
It also has Steam amd Heroic launcher pre-installed, so everything is just there ready to play.
Bazzite is a great general use/gaming linux OS / distro...
But in particular, getting UE5 set up and working on it, as a game development engine, is actually very, very not fun.
It is much easier to set up Godot or even O3DE, or Bevy. Those are all fully open source, and also totally free to use, no liscensing payments for making a game with them.
Uningine is a seemingly little known, closed source, but much more generally linux compatible game engine, that imo rivals UE5 in terms of features and capabilities, and also Flax Engine exists, is uh, 'source available'.
Both of those have something like a 'pay x% of your game revenue per time period after it exceeds $y per time period' model, similarish to Unity... and they also have better, more broad native linux support than UE5.
...
But uh, why aren't UE5 snd Bazzite a good fit?
Well, for starters, UE5 officially supports Rocky and Redhat linux.
You may note that Bazzite is not, nor is based on either of those.
Bazzite is basically a customized version of Fedora.
Further, Bazzite's whole paradigm is that of a sealed off base OS, and then everything else is run or installed in atomized containers, use flatpaks as much as possible.
Generally, this is great for stability, gaming, and being able to rapidly update and improve the OS...
But when you are running a game engine for development, especially on linux, you will often need to download and install all of its specifically required dependencies, and Bazzite, by design, is geared toward you not doing that.
It wants you to use distrobox, podman, distroshelf, etc, to set up essentially a containerized, near approximate of a more standard linux setup within Bazzite, and then do any real development work within that... and this can lead to various weird, esoteric problems, that there isn't really anybody with guides or documentation on how to handle, because setting up a game dev engine in this way is extremely uncommon.
(Especially so if you want to actually do some kind of customized build of the engine from source, because you need or want some existing, additional, but non standard capabilities)
(Though of course that doesn't apply to UE5, they are not open source)
This makes it more complicated to set up a properly working game engine, especially when native linux compatibility is uh, advertised, but not well documented, updated, or fully working in practice.
...
UE5 is also very, very much just offering 'linux support' as an after thought.
UE5 + linux + containerized, atomized linux = you're gonna have a bad time.
If you wanna go with Bazzite, and a totally free and open source game engine, I'd suggest Godot, Bevy and/or O3DE, roughly in that order of increasing difficulty of getting them to actually work properly.
You could also maybe consider Raylib/RayEngine, though I don't have much experience with it.
Another recommendation for Bazzite!
CachyOS has been very good for me for a similar purpose
Bazzite and CachyOS are most often recommended gaming distros. Both are immutable Bazzite is immutable. Bazzite is based on Fedora and CachyOS is based on Arch.
Unreal Engine for Linux is a thing so that shouldnโt be a problem.
I think both Bazzite and CachyOS are solid recommendations, but only Bazzite is immutable out of those two.
Thanks for pointing that. For some reason, I thought CachyOS is immutable.
I used Lutris for anything Windows related that needs installers, etc. You can run that on pretty much anything.
As far as distros go it depends on how hands off you want it to be. If you want a set it and forget it distro I'd go with Fedora or Ubuntu.
If you want something more bleeding edge and customisable I'd go with EndeavourOS, which is basically Arch on rails.
there's basically two types of dudes (gender not inferred): the ones that faced with a problem go "hmm, that's interesting. let's try..." regardless if it's a lazy afternoon or they're under heavy artillery fire... and then there are those that invariably go "oh what the fuck now!?"
if you're in the latter camp, you have one option and that's Ubuntu. for an experienced user it does suck in some ways, but it "just works" in so many others. you will have ample challenges making the transition and you don't need additional ones.
when you've been around the block a few times, survived a crash or two, know what's what and have at least a passable understanding of the OS, then you can travel farther and explore options, as your switching costs to something like Fedora WS are essentially zero and 99% of what you learned applies.
but, right now, you can stop looking - this is your only option.
Mint is Ubuntu-based and I find it very natural to transition to from Windows. More natural than Ubuntu, despite me being slightly more familiar with Ubuntu from work.
I've never found it to suck, but I don't get on my computer to fuck around with the OS and make things just exactly the way I like them. I automate some scripts to save myself typing for things I commonly do, and I do gaming, browsing, and development. I've yet to find Mint wanting. It makes more sense to me than macOS.
here's why you're doing beginners a disservice with Mint.
it's an X11 distro. no big deal if you're installing it on a 10-year old optiplex with a 1080p monitor, works same as wayland on that setup.
if it's a laptop, you get shitty scaling and hidpi support. worse touchpad gestures. dock/undock issues with multiple displays, not to mention - more scaling issues. even if there is some feature parity with a modern Gnome/Plasma desktop, the predominant development effort isn't in Cinnamon's camp.
if it's a modern desktop you also face issues with spotty support as Mint lags with kernel versions. finally if you got both, muscle memory is a problem if you got Cinnamon/X on desktop and Gnome/Wayland on laptop.
if you're an experienced user, yes, I am sure you can make it work. for a beginner, we need an onboarding path with the least possible issues and when there are any, ample documentation on how to fix it.
Same boat - i found popOS the right fit fรผr me, the thinkpad just humms along, even with firmware updates
If you like the most up to date software but an wasy setup I generally recommend openSUSE Tumbleweed. Its easy to manage, gets the newest software, well supported, and has worked great for boty gaming and hobbiest level programming. Been using it for almost a year eith zero issues.
If you are looking for something more gaming focused and kind of just ready right out of the box, Bazzite is a good call. Its atomic so hard to break, big community so lots of support, and has all the necessary software installed.
If you want to know more about Linux, I recommend Arch Linux. Despite how hard it is said to be, the installation is actually pretty easy as long as you can read the installation wiki. You can apply the knowledge of the arch wiki to many distros, so if you don't want to use Arch Linux, make sure to keep the arch wiki in mind.
If you want one that just works out of the box, I generally recommend Fedora KDE Plasma edition. If you want an immutable one (one that you can't easily break), Fedora Kinoite (this also comes with the KDE Plasma DE).
Bazzite for gaming, but you will only get a cursory glance at Linux as it's locked down for the most part. Avoid Ubuntu like the plague, go for something like Mint (based on but not the same as) if you want to get an easy Linux experience to learn more. If you like doing it the hard way (easier nowadays) go for something like Arch or Gentoo where you get all the controls you might want over your system. I myself have used Debian for years without issue. Fedora (which Bazzite is based off of) is a decent enough distro as well. You can get a better insight in what you could go for by using https://distrochooser.de/
when I was in uni like 5 years ago I put arch on the school provided laptop. Not saying to use arch but iirc I had to compile ue4 for Linux because a pre compiled binary wasnโt available. It had issues compared to windows.
The Unreal Engine for Linux page indicates that they offer pre-compiled builds for Ubuntu 22.04.
It's possible that those pre-compiled builds might work on Linux Mint, since Mint is based on Ubuntu. I would probably try this before committing to the officially supported Ubuntu version, both because it's nice to have a newer distro and because Mint has a good track record of avoiding Ubuntuisms that are not generally well received (e.g. Snap).
If you don't mind some extra work, you can apparently build Unreal for other linux distros. See here:
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https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/linux-development-quickstart-for-unreal-engine
I tinkered a bit with linux before and dual-booted for about 3 months before I switched entirely to linux about a year ago now. I used this "grace period" to get more familiar, set up everything like i wanted it, and just tested some stuff.
After using Mint before I settled for EndeavourOS. It's based on Arch. As a rolling release OS I find it interesting for gaming and getting recent updates that are not entirely bleeding edge. There were some learning and even issues in the beginning concerning nvidia GPUs but I didn't have any major issues for months now. The only major issue I had was cause by my own stupidity but also could be fixed using chroot.
I personally use Nobara for gaming and streaming. I don't remember why I ended up going with Nobara over Bazzite, but I love it!