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by stjohnswarts 2095 days ago
It is much better. Run it in a VM for a while and get a feel for it. Pick one of the stable versions like Redhat (Centos) or Ubuntu LTS so that you don't have to worry about constant updates as you would in Manjaro/Arch. And buy linux compatible hardware or system if you plan on using it professionally. A preinstalled machine/laptop is great for that. Dell and Lenovo have several.
1 comments
adsjhdashkj 2095 days ago
Any recommendation for linux compatible hardware? I'll be building a new machine next year and i'd like to make it work with Linux, so a buying list would be nice.

I know the CPU/Ram/GPU i want, but i imagine most of the trouble is motherboard, since so many features are there.

I'm also curious how my current hardware rates on compatibility.

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stjohnswarts 2095 days ago
I've been building my own systems for a while. As long as you don't get the absolute newest motherboards you'll probably be okay. I have never had an issue with Linux and the Asus/MSI boards I've bought. Also like someone else said go with an AMD GPU. On a self build you can always send parts back. But if you get a laptop and it doesn't work with Linux make sure they have a return policy :) . They're much more cantankerous in my experience. That said if you stick with a mainstream Linux like Ubuntu you'll probably be fine with nvidia. I just prefer AMD gpu policies because they open source the driver code. I think both have had issues with Linux in the past, so sometimes you have to try a couple of different versions of the drivers. I tend to be conservative and not always go with bleeding edge. However sometimes that's what works.
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d3nj4l 2095 days ago
Go with AMD for graphics for sure! Support is so much better overall than nVidia.
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adsjhdashkj 2095 days ago
Interesting, i've heard Nvidia is the way to go. Closed source, yes, but still great drivers. I saw some very concerning behavior from AMD GPUs, like not releasing decent drivers for ages after new cards were released, etc.

I also have an Nvidia right now, so.. hopefully it works great hah. Otherwise i'll be on Windows.

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chupasaurus 2095 days ago
tl;dr: AMD - if a particular GPU is supported by your kernel and Mesa versions, it works flawlessly, NVIDIA - way more ifs and randomness.

AMD: check in which kernel version AMD added the support for your GPU, and which Mesa version has feature parity (most of the time it's already there because there weren't any big shifts since Vega, RDNA2 might be that one) and you're good to go on any distro.

NVIDIA: Wayland support isn't there for years and foreseeable future, random issues with driver updates. Supports only 3 distros (Red Hat family, SUSE and Ubuntu without derivatives, I even made a page for devs how to add Debian flavour of it on any deb distro since Mint users were constantly struggling), Debian makes it's own decoupling of blob which works flawlessly but new version might not be there for a month because maintainers aren't there. I still remember that full support for Pascal has landed 6 months after the release.

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