My current favorite distros
Last updated: 2017–01–09
This is a constantly evolving and to-be-updated article of my Linux distribution experiences. I haven’t got that many years of Linux usage behind me so there’s no full reviews presented yet.
At the moment my current favorite distros are (in this order):
- Xubuntu (needs some tweaking after install but all around great and light)
- Zorin OS (12 Beta) (great for beginners or people coming from Windows)
- Ubuntu
- Solus OS (great for beginners but feels a bit unfinished for me)
- Ubuntu GNOME
- Lubuntu
- elementary OS (great for beginners, or people coming from Mac OS X)
- Manjaro XFCE (a bit technical but great and light. Krita OpenGL was slow, though)
- Debian
- Kubuntu
Xubuntu
- Quite polished/usable straight from the first boot
- Nice, light and fast XFCE desktop environment
- Familiar Ubuntu base (easy to use the PPAs to install latest Blender and other applications)
- Awesomely quick to go to suspend mode. Although sometimes it works and sometimes not
- Almost all artists used this in Blender Institute back in 2015, I got used to it :)
— Getting CUDA to work in Blender is a little hassle
— No good Wacom configuration application
— Dropbox had flaw with system tray icon, needed a fix
— Sometimes won’t go into Suspend mode or doesn’t successfully come out of it. Pretty annoying :(
— When opening a browser window it spams you with some unneeded keyring password popups multiple times in a row, very very annoying
Zorin OS (12 Beta)
- Very polished/usable straight from the first boot
- Feels very good to use somehow
- Very Windows 7 like
- Good, nicely modified GNOME desktop environment
- Familiar Ubuntu base (easy to use the PPAs to install latest Blender and other applications)
- Okay Wacom configuration application
- Suspend mode works (hold down Alt while pressing the shutdown button on bottom-right corner, it turns into pause-symbol)
— Getting CUDA to work in Blender is a little hassle
Ubuntu
- Popular, thoroughly tested, stable
- Quite polished/usable straight from the first boot
- Functional Unity desktop environment
- Familiar Ubuntu base (easy to use the PPAs to install latest Blender and other applications)
— Getting CUDA to work in Blender is a little hassle
Solus OS
- Quite polished/usable straight from the first boot
- Very sleek looking!
- New, under development Budgie desktop environment, which can be installed even into Ubuntu. There is, however, a specific Ubuntu Budgie distro for that.
— A bit unfamiliar base and new eopkg package manager (not apt, like in Ubuntu)
— CUDA works for downloaded Blenders but not for the ones installed from the Software Center
— Can’t seem to get suspend mode to work
However, I’m really keeping a close eye on how this distro develops in the future. I really like it!
Ubuntu GNOME
- Quite polished/usable straight from the first boot
- Good GNOME desktop environment
- Familiar Ubuntu base (easy to use the PPAs to install latest Blender and other applications)
- Okay Wacom configuration application
— Getting CUDA to work in Blender is a little hassle
— Colors in the images that are viewed with the default image viewer look grayish when compared to Gimp, for example
Lubuntu
- Extremely light and fast LXDE desktop environment
- Familiar Ubuntu base (easy to use the PPAs to install latest Blender and other applications)
— Takes a bit of time to configure it to work well for me
— Getting CUDA to work in Blender is a little hassle
— No good Wacom configuration application
— A bit …. ugly (but can be configured to look a lot nicer)
elementary OS
- Elegant Pantheon desktop environment
- Very sleek and nice to use
- Familiar Ubuntu base (easy to use the PPAs to install latest Blender and other applications)
- Good Wacom configuration application
— Getting CUDA to work in Blender is a little hassle
— There are some annoyances that push me away from using it
Manjaro XFCE
- Quite polished/usable straight from the first boot
- NVIDIA drivers and CUDA actually working in Blender straight after installation without any hassle (when Manjaro has been installed via the non-free drivers installation option)
- Because Manjaro is based on Arch Linux, which is a rolling distro, it installs the latest Blender build straight from the Add/Remove Software application as well as the other needed applications in their latest state like Krita 3.0, GIMP, Kdenlive, etc.
- Xfce is a nice, light and fast desktop environment, I haven’t tried the Manjaro KDE or other community flavors yet
- Somehow weirdly the Xfce feels even faster in Manjaro than in Xubuntu, for example. Maybe because of Arch, hard to say
— Krita’s OpenGL mode, like rotating the canvas, acted very slowly for some reason. Xubuntu was way better in this regard
— No good Wacom configuration application (might be available in the Manjaro GNOME version, maybe, don’t know) — in the meantime, I use my small Wacom shell scripts.
— Easystroke doesn’t work as consistently as in Xubuntu, which is annoying.
Debian (GNOME)
- Stable Debian
- Good GNOME desktop environment. There are many other DEs available in the installer.
— Harder/techier/non-user-friendly to get NVIDIA drivers and CUDA work in Blender
— Harder/non-user-friendly to install latest versions of applications from repositories (Debian doesn’t support PPA, at least without hassle)
Kubuntu
- Quite polished/usable straight from the first boot
- Good, very configurable KDE desktop environment, which takes a bit of time to get used to, though
- Familiar Ubuntu base (easy to use the PPAs to install latest Blender and other applications)
- Okay Wacom configuration application
— Getting CUDA to work in Blender is a little hassle
— Has weird annoying glitch with the background on my pivoted monitor
Other distros I’ve tried
Antergos
— Before getting even into the installer it went to black screen with a ‘Kernel Panic’ message, no matter how I tried to boot from the USB stick.
I had to press ‘e’ to edit the boot command by adding ‘nomodeset’ to the end of the command.
After that, the installation went on nicely.
— Surprisingly difficult to have English installation but with Finnish currency and values
— NVIDIA drivers can be easily installed and CUDA is then available in Blender. However, Blender seems to work quite slowly in viewport (low fps)
Manu Järvinen
manujarvinen.com
@manujarvinen2016
“My current favorite distros” by Manu Järvinen is licensed under CC BY 4.0