I’m sick of Windows, and especially what it’s become, and the way its trending looks like it will only get worse. I’ll be building a brand new PC this summer and want to choose a Linux Distro instead. In preparation, I’d like to try out a virtual machine with a Linux distribution. I am solidly familiar with Ubuntu, but I think it’s time to try something that may cater to my specific needs more.
I use my machine for work and gaming (mostly Steam). I am a fullstack software developer and use a second MacBook as well for my daily work needs.
I’ve had Manjaro, and OpenSUSE recommended to me by a friend who likes both of them but he doesn’t game much and doesn’t need various software development tools.
Are Manjaro or OpenSUSE good choices? I know there’s a tonne of distros out there, and I’m trying to narrow things down a bit. Hopefully this community has some helpful advice.
Thanks in advance!
EDIT: First of all, thank-you everyone for your help and positivity. It’s been less than a day and the amount of advice and ideas is fantastic. Not too mention the noticeable lack of negative comments (a huge reason I left reddit more than a year ago), thank-you all for reaffirming my reasons.
I’ve got to admit, I’m a little overwhelmed by all of the advice, but in a good way. I will be scrutinizing all of this advice and laying it out into a roadmap for both my distro testing, as well as PC building. You are all making this community a helpful and spectacular place. I hope one day to be able to pay it forward! Please keep it up!
The OS on the Steam Deck is Arch based, just like Manjaro, so I imagine it’ll do games.
I’m a fullstack developer as well, and use Arch as my daily driver, and have for the past 9 years. While I can’t speak for Manjaro directly, just the upstream, I have some coworkers that use it without issue. I think it’d be fine for your needs, at least worth trying out. I hear a lot of bleeding edge horror stories thrown around but in that 9 years 95% of problems were of my own doing, and the 5% were easily fixed with a rollback of a package. Out of that, my downtime isn’t worth mentioning it’s so negligible. I feel my coworkers on macos have more issues with major version upgrades by far.
On Arch-based distros, pkgbuild is a great way to handle custom packages when needed, and the AUR is gives me almost everything I need that isn’t in the official repos. It’s a great developer environment.
I’m very interested in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed as well, was thinking of trying it out as my next distro on a personal machine to try out something new since I’ve been on a single distro for so long, but not because I need anything new, just sounds like fun.
Yes, SteamOS is arch based, but the games run over steam runtime (wich is debian based) that’s why the steam-native package exists. I use endeavour btw.