"Best" Linuxdistro for RT, DT, Gimp and Gmic?

Software
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For the last few days, I have been experimenting a lot with Oracle VM VirtualBoxes, using Win 7/64-bit as a host. Here are the Linux distros I have been playing with

(“mini” means Ubuntu minimal.)

Oh, they are all very much alike – but a for a few, installation of development versions of RT, DT, Gimp and Gmic (which are my favourite applications) was much easier.

Would you care to have a guess about which distros handled compilation/installation good - and which did not? – And perhaps also what went wrong :rage: ?

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Were you compiling those respective projects from source, or using pacakge managers?

Not sure which would have handled it better than others. I’m guessing debian was a pain in some way?

Also, i wasn’t able to get openSUSE running in a VM for some reason (Tumbleweed?). Kept having issues. I’ll have to revisit soon.

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  1. @patdavid you never told me. Also Tumbleweed is our rolling releaes distribution. While Leap is the stable version.

  2. my call is for openSUSE we have the graphics project which has up2date versions of the packages you look for. ok gmic we need to update.

so +1 for openSUSE. but i might be biased. :slight_smile:

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This is mostly because I was mostly sure I was screwing something up, and didn’t want to bug you with the triviality of it. Basically, I’m just saving my goodwill with you for when I make the swtich full-time on my old macbook hardware. Then I’ll be concerned about getting things working for sure and leaning on your expertise… :wink:

Also +1 for openSUSE, mostly because you have a @darix you can bug if needed (if he can keep me from blowing up this forum he can probably keep your openSUSE running).

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I’m on Manjaro and find it much more capable when compiling software. I don’t think I’ll ever go back to a Debian or Debian based system, but I must admit to being intrigued by OpenSuse.

OpenSuse Imagewriter is hands down the best utility for creating a bootable usb. Has nothing to do with the topic at hand. I’m just sayin’.

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“Best” is not a good metric, what works for others may not work well for you.

That being said, Ubuntu has PPA’s for most of the software you listed and that’d probably be the router that requires the least effort. That being said, I have Ubuntu Mate 16.04 installed now to try the Hugin PPA, and man it is not stable.

Debian testing will surely not be the way to go, as it has breakage and they’re in the middle of a development cycle.

OpenSUSE Leap may lag a bit behind in having the newest versions, but the OBS that suse provides is a nice option to deliver packages. If you’re comfortable rolling, maybe try Tumbleweed. Suse’s automated testing, OpenQA, seems very compelling.

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@paperdigits Well, it was the best I could come up with.
To be on the safe side, I put it within quotation marks, though.

@patdavid RT from GitHub, Gimp-Edge from ppa:otto-kesselgulasch and DT from ppa:pmjdebruin

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I used a lot of distros in the last years. I find the Ubuntu based the easiest for the beginner. I liked Bodhi Linux very much, but now i use Manjaro XFCE and find it very fast in my 8 years old MacPro. It has all the latest software and is stable, fast and looks great.

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