Currently I’m using Linux Mint but I’m having issues with my Nvidia graphics card.
Please don’t suggest Arch Linux. I’m looking for a stable, polished and easy-to-use distro. I have my eyes set on Pop!_OS for a while.
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The Nvidia graphics driver manager just shows a blank screen when opened. I have installed the recommended driver but it still gobbles up my battery unlike Windows 10 and the fan runs at full speed.
I had tried some fixes from the internet but nothing seemed to work.
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Yes
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All of them.
If you have an nvidia card I think you should just go ahead and give Pop OS a try.
I’ve been using it for a few months, and it’s been very stable.
It’s a great distro and has options for graphics cards made specifically for System76 hardware, some of which come with nvidia graphics cards. It might just solve whatever problem you’re having.
I found up-to-date distros to be the least annoying when you mostly do programming, because unless you’re working in a really slow-moving ecosystem like C, most of your tooling will generally be tested against the latest or close-to-latest version of its libraries.
So, if those are the library versions that are installed on your system, that usually makes things throw up less problems.I also had the impression that distros which do lots of custom-patching (which are basically just Debian-based distros) will break apart quicker when you have to make changes to your system (because they were custom-patched to work in this one particular way).
And sometimes you just have to or want to make changes to your system to get a tool to work.So, my recommendation is openSUSE Tumbleweed or Fedora, even though they may not always be quite as easy-to-use for non-programming things.
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Debian is the best for most stuff if but it takes some knowledge to configure Debian well. Also Ubuntu and Fedora are good for someone who does not want to tinker. Fedora is little worse for programming due to packages having different names than Debian based distros and most tutorials.
I heard from my prof and my friend that installing Debian and configuring it to use nvidia is not very trivial.
it’s not too hard, it mainly comes down to enabling the repositories you need in a config file. In my opinion, it’s worth it to avoid the Canonical bullshit like Snap that’s included in Ubuntu.
I think Pop!_OS is a great choice, it looks good and is very customizable and gets hardware updates pretty fast.
Do you use it?
I don’t anymore, I run arco-linux now because I like messing around with multiple desktop environments. It’s pretty good, but I think for stability Pop! is better, also it feels more solid and complete because it’s a distro maintained by a company with a team dedicated to it. The Pop! shell is also pretty good.
I’ve been using pop for almost an year now and it is definitely stable and reliable. Although, I have to say that pop-shell caused me a bit too much frustration because of weird bugs. They eventually fix them and their github/mattermost is really friendly, their site also actually helped me with most of the issues I had without having to ask around. But pop-shell does not look like to be as mature as I was expecting
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I’m a fan of Fedora. They update their packages regularly, but not bleeding edge. Their “toolbox” for spinning up containers is great for dev work. It let’s you easily spin up and destroy dev environments on a whim, without cluttering your system.
Not sure how their Nvidia drivers are lately, but IIRC they got a repo in the software center you can activate with them.
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Manjaro is pretty good. The best thing about it is that it’s quite stable, the open source and proprietary driver is up to date and it has everything that Arch has, including aur.
I think the least worst is OpenSUSE Leap or Tumbleweed with Plasma, because they have good support of containerization technologies, so you use the OCI images you prefer to develop and you can rest assured that the system will boot even in case of errors if you use snapshots by BTRFS. Plasma has desktop widgets for viewing issues from GitHub and GitLab which are very handy.
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Arch linux ;) . Or if you need a more beginner-friendly install, manjaro or endeavor. The AUR makes installing the most up to date versions really easy… I remember on ubuntu, the repos had 3+ year old versions of a lot of things like postgres, which then people had to make custom ppas just to get the newest versions. That’s not a problem on arch-based distros.
Its a misconception that arch isn’t polished, or crashes a lot. I’ve had updates break things far more often when I used Ubuntu, than on arch. And I’ve been on the same rolling distro for ~ 3 years now.
Do you have a non-Nvidia GPU by any chance? I remember when I tried Manjaro, and an Nividia driver update killed my installation.
I have an nvidia GPU, but its one of those hybrid ones for notebooks, so it took some more configuring on arch. But at least their docs do give good instructions on how to get it working.
I think Arch breaking probably depends on what you do. My virtual machines are guaranteed to be broken if I haven’t booted them for over 6 months. Sometimes you also actually have to put stuff in to pacman’s ignore list when updates cause more headache than they’re worth.
Really doesn’t matter to be honest. Whichever distro you choose, you’ll be able to program somehow. Pop_Os! is a good bet for graphics cards issues though, so I’d say roll with it.
Fedora has a Python spin that will get you all loaded out with an IDE and learning programs.
