Need Help Choosing Distro

[Grassman]

Hi all,

I'm building a PC with Nvidia GPU which I plan to daily drive linux on.

 

My main use case will be:

1. Editing;

2. Local LLM (potentially use it as a server for my other devices as well);

3. Gaming; and

4. Streaming.

 

I've had some experience running Fedora, Void, and FreeBSD (not Linux, but unix based with similar user experience) on my laptop, so I wouldn't say I'm a complete beginner, but not really an expert either.

 

While I do have some technical know-hows from tinkering with linux in the past (especially Void, which was a major PITA to install and set-up), I'd much rather avoid friction as much as possible so I can focus on being productive instead of spending hours troubleshooting.

 

Currently considering Fedora, Mint, or Ubuntu (probably closest thing to "just works" for my use-case). Have heard a lot of hype around Bazzite and Nobara, but since they're just forks of Fedora, I don't really see the value in using either.

 

Any advice? Thanks!

PS. I've read that Nvidia drivers require signing for secure boot to work. While secure boot is not mandatory, I'd like to enable it anyway for security reasons and due to some games requiring it. A distro that could configure this automatically on installation or with minimal hassle would be great.

EDIT: Probably worth mentioning that I'll be using dual monitors setup: a 1440p monitor, and a mini 1080p monitor. Have heard that X11 doesn't play well with dual monitors.

[Nord1ing]

i'd say debian or mint lmde. For server application i like how smooth is update between major version without needing to reinstall everything  

Already updated 3 times.

[Grassman]

19 minutes ago, Nord1ing said:

i'd say debian or mint lmde. For server application i like how smooth is update between major version without needing to reinstall everything  

Already updated 3 times.

Hmm, I'm reading Debian's documentation for Nvidia Drivers and Secure Boot, and it seems to be much more complicated to setup than Fedora. How's your experience so far?

[Nord1ing]

51 minutes ago, Grassman said:

Hmm, I'm reading Debian's documentation for Nvidia Drivers and Secure Boot, and it seems to be much more complicated to setup than Fedora. How's your experience so far?

no idea about nvidia, it might work on mint lmde 

the best way is boot live usb and test

[Acans]

I went with Fedora, and followed this guide to get my 5080 working.

 

https://github.com/Comprehensive-Wall28/Nvidia-Fedora-Guide

 

However I didn't know Nobara existed before I took the leap. I thought I would go with Debian since I used it before for servers, but it was a behind in support for my newer GPU. 

 

Nobara is meant to already have the Nvidia drivers, so not sure if that also has an auto process for secure boot that I had to go through in the above guide. It also includes the multimedia codex which I had to manually sort out to get my HEVC to work in VLC.

 

Might be worth a shot. Personally I only learnt of Nobara when I checked the January 2026 Linux Steam survey, with it being slightly behind Fedora. If I knew of the Survey first, I might have tried CachyOS since it's quite high and barely behind Arch.

[Dr. Will0hlep]

Mint is best.

[Grassman]

36 minutes ago, Acans said:

I went with Fedora, and followed this guide to get my 5080 working.

 

https://github.com/Comprehensive-Wall28/Nvidia-Fedora-Guide

 

However I didn't know Nobara existed before I took the leap. I thought I would go with Debian since I used it before for servers, but it was a behind in support for my newer GPU. 

 

Nobara is meant to already have the Nvidia drivers, so not sure if that also has an auto process for secure boot that I had to go through in the above guide. It also includes the multimedia codex which I had to manually sort out to get my HEVC to work in VLC.

 

Might be worth a shot. Personally I only learnt of Nobara when I checked the January 2026 Linux Steam survey, with it being slightly behind Fedora. If I knew of the Survey first, I might have tried CachyOS since it's quite high and barely behind Arch.

Did some reading on Nobara and turns out, they're not even compatible with secure boot.

CachyOS looks interesting. Their documentation on setting up secure boot doesn't look too bad (pretty similar to fedora), and Da Vinci Resolve seem to work out of the box (unlike most other distro which needs tweaking).

 

Downside is, since it's a rolling release, things might break more often and so will require more maintenance over time. So I'd expect it to be much easier to set up, but keeping it working might be an issue.

[Grassman]

45 minutes ago, Dr. Will0hlep said:

Mint is best.

LMDE or Ubuntu and why?

[Nord1ing]

1 hour ago, Grassman said:

LMDE or Ubuntu and why?

Imo, It depends on your hardware: does lmde support all pieces: for example gpu, network cards? 
I would stick to lmde as more stable.

 

i had intel n150 mini pc, there any mint (lmde or mint 22.2) does not worked out-of-box and i do not feel like messing with backports

[spelican]

A great option would be Fedora, as somebody else has said. It's got good support for recent hardware due to having a faster release cycle than Debian or Ubuntu based distributions, and it is easy to set up too. I started out with Fedora and it was great! (I now use EndeavourOS, but I wouldn't really recommend that for new users unless they know what they are doing given that it is rolling release and thus less stable so more tinkering)

 

Some tips as a former Fedora user:

- make sure to enable "third-party repositories" or "proprietary repositories" in the setup screen. It sounds like something scary, but that it's really doing is enabling the repositories for closed-source drivers (like Nvidia drivers!) and closed-source software (like Steam, which I assume you want for gaming, and Chrome if you're attached to that. I really reckon you try Firefox or something Firefox-based, and if not, try Ungoogled Chromium)

- Between "Workstation" (which is GNOME) and "KDE" (which is the Plasma spin), I highly encouraged using a live boot environment to play around, see what interface you enjoy more. It's not a hard decision, since you can at any time switch between the two (you can even run both at once, but then you get duplicated file managers and such that are optimised for the two different desktop environments). I at first ran with GNOME but later switched to the Plasma spin. There are also various other spins that you can try out (like COSMIC, or Budgie) but the majority of Fedora users (and thus most of the support, docs, etc.) focus on GNOME and KDE Plasma. 

- If you really want me to help you make a decision between Workstation and KDE editions of Fedora, the TLDR is that GNOME is more "minimalistic" (padding, clean interface, simplified everything basically) but is less customisable, while KDE Plasma is polished and uber-customisable but might give you the fatigue of too many options (personally, I love customisation, so I really like KDE!)

 

Some general Linux tips:

 

Don't be afraid of the command line. Use a bit of nano here and there, cd into directories, "mkdir" and "touch" all you want, and especially use "dnf" and "flatpak" to install/update/remove programs. Running "sudo dnf update" and "flatpak update" updates all programs automagically, which you don't really have on Windows! 

 

If you are talking about image editing, then you have GIMP (which is like Photoshop, but different and no subscription! There's also "Photogimp" which helps photoshop users transition), Inkscape (which is like Illustrator, editing vector graphics and such. This one I use a lot and it works well!), and Krita (which is a drawing program for artists. For video editing, Kdenlive is nice (I like it a lot!) but may not have the features required for professional use. Davinci Resolve also exists on Linux, but I heard it's a pain in the butt to install, but I never used it before. 

 

For game streaming, I've heard Sunshine/Moonlight are a good option. You could also use Steam Link I think.

 

If you want to play "Epic Games" games, I've heard that Heroic is a good launcher for that. If you play Minecraft, Prism Launcher is awesome! Lutris is another launcher that is like a hub to play games from all platforms (Steam, itch.io, even retro titles with emulators).

 

For Local LLM, there's a bazillion of them of varying quality (given the current AI bubble, everyone wants in) so pick and choose. I don't really use local AI as my computer isn't a new CoPilot++ Premium Ultra model or whatever they're calling it now.

[igormp]

2 hours ago, Grassman said:

since it's a rolling release, things might break more often and so will require more maintenance over time

I honestly have never found an issue with rolling release distros, Arch in particular (which is what I use, btw) hardly ever breaks anything, and the "maintenance" is just keeping an eye on their news feed to see if anything requires manual intervention. Personally I've only ever had to do such interventions once or twice per year.

 

Not sure how different CachyOS would be from that, but Arch makes it easy to have the latest Nvidia stuff up and running. I don't really play game nowadays, but working with LLMs (and development in general) has been a breeze.

[PDifolco]

If you want something stable nice and works well, but limited by later upgrades, I'd say Mint, Cinnamon is quite nice too

Now if you want latest kernel and ability to tinker, why not an Arch distro ? I use CachyOS which is mostly an accessible Arch version, avoiding the install sh*tshow ...

Can't say for NVidia drivers now, but I had no issue with a 3080 on Mint a few years ago, now I'm AMD so no issue with anything Linux  

[Mina G]

7 hours ago, Nord1ing said:

i'd say debian or mint lmde. For server application i like how smooth is update between major version without needing to reinstall everything  

Already updated 3 times.

first thing  make sure that all the servers software support the distro you chose because with LLMS or server software sometimes you could save a lot of headache by choosing a supported distro specifically with there dependencies  

 

initially i would recommend nobara 

it has kernel patches for gaming so it's not the same as fedora 

it has nvidia drivers packed in 

it's based on fedora so it's solid and well supported any package for fedora should work on nobara 

 

i am not sure about the secure boot but red hat engineers introduced the certificates for secure boot signing so it would be weird if fedora doesn't support it i am not sure about nobara though nobara doesn't support secure boot and you have to use UEFI .. Read more

 

if secure boot is a must maybe fail to fedora or ubunto depending on the situation 

 

 

 

[Ha-Satan]

9 hours ago, Grassman said:

LMDE or Ubuntu and why?

So as far as I know, Mint (in every flavor, LMDE or non-LMDE) defaults to X11. I think you can switch to Wayland, but support for Wayland in Mint is still "experimental."

 

You are correct that X11 does not handle mixed-refresh, mixed-res, multi-monitor setups very well. You are better off using a distro that ships with a Wayland-native desktop environment by default (like Fedora KDE).

 

Don't get me wrong, Mint is a very stable and user-friendly distro, but the problems with X11 are legitimate concerns.

[Lurking]

11 hours ago, Mina G said:

initially i would recommend nobara 

it has kernel patches for gaming so it's not the same as fedora 

it has nvidia drivers packed in 

it's based on fedora so it's solid and well supported any package for fedora should work on nobara 

 

i am not sure about the secure boot but red hat engineers introduced the certificates for secure boot signing so it would be weird if fedora doesn't support it i am not sure about nobara though nobara doesn't support secure boot and you have to use UEFI .. Read more

Is Nobara a bit behind with Fedora updates? I saw a YT video today about Nobara, claiming it has KDE 6.5. i don't know if that video was done a while ago, but it was shown today. I just ask since Fedora is on KDE 6.6.1 already. Do you have it installed by any chance and could look? 

 

I'm not saying this is bad, but may matter for some. One thing with Nobara if you want to use it long-term, this is just a one-person distro. So, at some point it either grows, or may be delayed with things. With Fedora, you know it provides updates, even if one person is out sick. Might not matter for gaming one bit, though. 

 

Fedora supports secure boot. 

[Mina G]

6 hours ago, Lurking said:

Is Nobara a bit behind with Fedora updates? I saw a YT video today about Nobara, claiming it has KDE 6.5. i don't know if that video was done a while ago, but it was shown today. I just ask since Fedora is on KDE 6.6.1 already. Do you have it installed by any chance and could look? 

no i didn't use it myself i only recmonded because the gaming related kernel patches and fedora is solid and i heard people happy with it but i didn't use myself 

6 hours ago, Lurking said:

I'm not saying this is bad, but may matter for some. One thing with Nobara if you want to use it long-term, this is just a one-person distro. So, at some point it either grows, or may be delayed with things. With Fedora, you know it provides updates, even if one person is out sick. Might not matter for gaming one bit, though. 

i didn't know that.

after some search you are right https://wiki.nobaraproject.org/modifications/fedora-repos 

i don't think i would recommend nobara again i thought it uses it's own repo on top of fedora but it use different snapshot than upstream that complicate things specially for beginners 

thank you for pointing that out 

 

 

[AtomicGlargh]

For NVIDIA Ubuntu LTS is the easiest and it is the most targeted for software.

[Lurking]

13 hours ago, Mina G said:

after some search you are right https://wiki.nobaraproject.org/modifications/fedora-repos 

i don't think i would recommend nobara again i thought it uses it's own repo on top of fedora but it use different snapshot than upstream that complicate things specially for beginners 

I didn't know about the repos. But that is the danger with small teams (or single person) using an existing distro. Either they use the very same packages, and just change some settings - then it is kind of pointless. Or they make actual changes to kernel etc., But then they have to maintain all the daily changes. This is just too much work - they can't replicate the work Fedora does. and it is kind of duplicated effort. and we don't need more fragmentation. 

 

I hate CLI!. But I rather wrestle with Fedora and some (very well guided, like rpm fusion) CLI to set it up, to know it always works and the Fedora team stands behind it. With Nobara maybe you save some time upfront, but then you runt he risk of having some issue later. 

 

I'm not saying it is bad, but the user should know and decide based on what matters to them. I go out of may way to use the original distro, and only deviate if there is a really strong reason. YMMV. I'm no Nvidia gamer, so this isn't a recommendation for gaming at all. 

[Mina G]

12 hours ago, Lurking said:

I didn't know about the repos. But that is the danger with small teams (or single person) using an existing distro. Either they use the very same packages, and just change some settings - then it is kind of pointless. Or they make actual changes to kernel etc., But then they have to maintain all the daily changes. This is just too much work - they can't replicate the work Fedora does. and it is kind of duplicated effort. and we don't need more fragmentation. 

 

totally agree with your take 

and i am not a gamer too 

however the season it's sometimes good because people don't what to use CLI that's why i recmonded it although i don't use it myself barbecues all the configs and tweaks for gaming 

however i agree with the small teams thing 100% although until now i hear things is good with nobara it's just the out of sync repo could be a problem for a beginner 

 

12 hours ago, Lurking said:

I hate CLI!. But I rather wrestle with Fedora and some (very well guided, like rpm fusion) CLI to set it up, to know it always works and the Fedora team stands behind it. With Nobara maybe you save some time upfront, but then you runt he risk of having some issue later. 

every body has his perferance the first thing i do when i install any distro is removing packagkitd and any GUI installers i hate them hahah i can't imagine using linux without using CLI i owulder how you do it ?

maybe with ubuntu and mint but i don't think that's case with arch or fedora maybe if someone used the GUI to add RPM fusion but then he at least need to have a basic understanding about how repo works 

 

12 hours ago, Lurking said:

I'm not saying it is bad, but the user should know and decide based on what matters to them. I go out of may way to use the original distro, and only deviate if there is a really strong reason. YMMV. I'm no Nvidia gamer, so this isn't a recommendation for gaming at all. 

the nobara advantage is the kernel patches which is not something trivial in my opinion and that's why people like chachyos for the same reason  the compiler optimizations and patches 

 

[Mina G]

17 hours ago, AtomicGlargh said:

For NVIDIA Ubuntu LTS is the easiest and it is the most targeted for software.

totally valid choice specially for old nvidia GPUs the use 470 driver 

[Lurking]

6 hours ago, Mina G said:

the nobara advantage is the kernel patches which is not something trivial in my opinion and that's why people like chachyos for the same reason  the compiler optimizations and patches 

Do those Kernel patches actually do something besides marketing? I mean, there is a whole Linux foundation working on improving the Kernel, how can a small team do it better? My suspicion is, they optimize one part, at the cost of other parts. So, a "gaming Kernel" will suck at al other tasks. and when the "normal" Kernel updates those patch people have to develop their patched Kernel in parallel. And any developer making something, will expect a the regular Kernel. Do the Cachy people actually create an actual improvement they can bring upstream to the Linux foundation to implement to the actual Kernel? 

 

Most tests show all distros are within 1-2% in performance with similar vintage Kernel. You could literally take two identical W11 PCs and they might test within 2% as well. I think that whole "patched Kernel" is more hype and leads to even more fragmentation and issues and wasted effort. 

Edit: it seems i was wrong, see below response by igormp

 

I also don't know if Nobara brings more people to Linux. If it wouldn't exist, people would use Fedora. Maybe one single person wouldn't use Linux because Fedora is too hard. On the other hand, maybe one person stays on windows because there are too many distros. Whatever you think the problems are with Linux and the low market share - more distros or Kernels are NOT the solution. 
Edit: it turns out, each distro seems to have very specific altered kernels. I give up, i just use a distro and stop worrying about kernel. if it works, it works. lol. 

[Mina G]

2 hours ago, Lurking said:

Do those Kernel patches actually do something besides marketing? I mean, there is a whole Linux foundation working on improving the Kernel, how can a small team do it better? My suspicion is, they optimize one part, at the cost of other parts. So, a "gaming Kernel" will suck at al other tasks. and when the "normal" Kernel updates those patch people have to develop their patched Kernel in parallel. And any developer making something, will expect a the regular Kernel. Do the Cachy people actually create an actual improvement they can bring upstream to the Linux foundation to implement to the actual Kernel? 

 i get your point i don't know actually i am not a gamer and i don't care about benchmarks personally so i don't know but if people want gaming and patches for gaming then here we are 

 

2 hours ago, Lurking said:

I also don't know if Nobara brings more people to Linux. If it wouldn't exist, people would use Fedora. Maybe one single person wouldn't use Linux because Fedora is too hard. On the other hand, maybe one person stays on windows because there are too many distros. Whatever you think the problems are with Linux and the low market share - more distros or Kernels are NOT the solution. 

i get your point and i agree with the premise. but what holding Linux isn't fragmentation is the lack of standardization .. anyway this point could get more technical so i will stop at

but i try to isolate my personal biases when advising people i try to be neutral as possible these distros  give a beginner what he wants maybe fedora it's too much for some people 

most people nowadays don't like using CLI which understandable people have there preferences  

 

from my experience the first distro i seriously start learning was fedora i used it for a long time the only reason i switched  was the IBM accusation of redhat 

i was afraid they would discontinue  fedora so i switched to debian  thankfully that didn't happen i didn't return to fedora however it's the longest disto i used.

fedora in my opinion require some CLI  on the long term i had multiple times when the package manager gone crazy and wanted to remove needed packages another times i had kernels problem and i needed to pin the kernel package .. etc and if another distro gives beginners a better experience then be it 

and that's why i don't recommend my current distro to beginners (opensuse slowroll) for the same reason actually that's true for any rolling release distro 

 

i want to add most distros even the big ones put there patches so it's not new 

 

Edit: in regard of gaming personally i don't consider playing on emulation layer is gaming and that's why i never cared about it personally i have a dual boot when i want to game and that's it  i don't use windows for anything else 

maybe if valve start to devolping a SDK for Proton so developers developed for it maybe then things start to be different 

 

with that said i totally get you and for the record we are not far of from each other on these matter 

 

 

[igormp]

2 hours ago, Lurking said:

I mean, there is a whole Linux foundation working on improving the Kernel, how can a small team do it better? My suspicion is, they optimize one part, at the cost of other parts. So, a "gaming Kernel" will suck at al other tasks. and when the "normal" Kernel updates those patch people have to develop their patched Kernel in parallel. And any developer making something, will expect a the regular Kernel.

Are you aware that there's no single "linux foundation" kernel? They just ship the code, it's up to each downstream user to build it with whichever configs they prefer. All distroes have their own set of configs and patches on top of those kernels, always doing tradeoff between which configs they do/don't use.

Developers don't expect a "regular" kernel because no such thing exists.

 

2 hours ago, Lurking said:

Do the Cachy people actually create an actual improvement they can bring upstream to the Linux foundation to implement to the actual Kernel? 

They actually don't have that many patches. Most of their stuff is just different kernel configs and build options. You can easily see that in their repos and docs:

https://wiki.cachyos.org/features/kernel/

https://github.com/CachyOS/linux-cachyos

https://github.com/CachyOS/kernel-patches/tree/master/6.19

 

And it actually has some nice options:

https://www.phoronix.com/review/epyc-cachyos-server-preview/7

 

9% better than ubuntu 25.10, 5% better than vanilla arch in avg.

 

2 hours ago, Lurking said:

more distros or Kernels are NOT the solution. 

Put it bluntly: no one cares. The whole thing about linux is about being able to customize stuff and do it your own way, that's what interests developers.

The kernel is not even something that end users should care about. There's no interest in "unifying" linux for the sake of mainstream users, because there's no money in that. Valve is the only one working on making such usability improvements because it brings them financial gains, but they still do it their own way with their own hardware.

Nobody is looking for a "solution" because it's not a problem to begin with. Users get confused about all those options? Too bad, they either learn or simply don't use it, period.

[Lurking]

14 minutes ago, Mina G said:

 but i try to isolate my personal biases when advising people i try to be neutral as possible these distros  give a beginner what he wants

 

i switched to debian 

 

that's true for any rolling release distro 

Yeah, most people advise new users to use whatever distro the advising person uses. This is bonkers since the person giving advice should have much more experience, so their distro may not work for a beginner. Currently i use Fedora, but i recommend MX Linux KDE. Less to no CLI. I would recommend Mint, but not before they offer proper fractional scaling. Or Ubuntu (if a user can live with snaps). 

 

If you can set up Debian, and are OK with the older items, that probably is the best choice. Unfortunately, this limitation doesn't apply to many newbies or gamers. I loved my Debian, but other distros are easier for noobs. 

Correct about rolling, which makes me surprised Cachy OS is recommended to newbies this day. It probably is a fine distro. But there will be inevitable trouble-shooting inherent to rolling. Doesn't mean it is the wrong choice, but the prospective user should be made aware. 

 

4 minutes ago, igormp said:

Are you aware that there's no single "linux foundation" kernel? They just ship the code, it's up to each downstream user to build it with whichever configs they prefer. All distroes have their own set of configs and patches on top of those kernels, always doing tradeoff between which configs they do/don't use.

Developers don't expect a "regular" kernel because no such thing exists.

Thanks for mentioning this. I did not know that. So if Arch had Kernel 6.18.503485hher last month, and Fedora has the same Kernel number this week, they are actually different? Or will they have different Kernel numbers (Obviously as a noob, I don't look beyond the 2 decimal points).

 

What about clones of distros? Does Pop_OS, for example, use the exact same Kernel as Ubuntu LTS (from whatever build date they clones it)? OR do they also patch it to make it different? 

[igormp]

8 minutes ago, Lurking said:

So if Arch had Kernel 6.18.503485hher last month, and Fedora has the same Kernel number this week, they are actually different?

Yes, they are different. Notice how it has both a version number, as well as some build-specific string of theirs. In my case, using upstream arch kernel:

# uname -a
Linux Titan 6.18.9-arch1-2 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Mon, 09 Feb 2026 17:16:33 +0000 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Notice the `-arch1-2` part.

Here's the specific patches that the Arch team applies to their kernel:

https://github.com/archlinux/linux/releases

You can see those being applied from their build scripts:

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/linux/-/blob/main/PKGBUILD?ref_type=heads

 

Also, as I said, it's not just the patches applied, but also the set of specific configs used when building the kernel. Here's Arch's config:

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/linux/-/blob/main/config.x86_64?ref_type=heads

 

Fedora, OTOH, has TONS of different configs and patches:

https://gitlab.com/cki-project/kernel-ark/-/tree/os-build/redhat/configs/fedora/generic/x86?ref_type=heads

 

Adding to the different configs, toolchain options (like using clang instead of gcc, or different linkers), patches, you also have things like the modules (drivers) which can be built or not alongside the kernel, and options that (dis)allow those modules.

31 minutes ago, Lurking said:

What about clones of distros? Does Pop_OS, for example, use the exact same Kernel as Ubuntu LTS (from whatever build date they clones it)? OR do they also patch it to make it different? 

Ubuntu has its own fork:

https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-kernel/ubuntu/+source/linux/+git/noble

 

Pop OS has its fork of the above fork:

https://github.com/pop-os/linux

In fact, they even use a different kernel version than ubuntu for their LTS kernel:

https://github.com/pop-os/pop/issues/1937

 

And this is not exclusive to the kernel alone. All distros have different way to build all kinds of packages, be it with extra patches, different configs, different compiler/linking options, etc etc.