Distro suitable for creative work?

Software
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Color Difference after profiling darktable
So I noticed that even if I have both XNView MP and darktable set to use my Asus monitor profile for displaying, XNView the image looks a lot darker: [Capture 2025-03-29 15,41,35] [Capture 2025-03-29 15,41,44] These are my settings: [image] [image] Does anyone know what could be the problem? The photo looks a lot better (almost the same) when opened in a browser. In any other image viewer it looks just like in XNView… Re-opening the exported photo in darktable makes it look just like …

So I’m thinking of possibly getting a Linux distro in the (near?) future due to weird color management stuff happening on my Windows systen… what distro would you guys recommend me to get? I might…

  • get a second SSD and dual boot my current Windows 11 Dell laptop
  • later get a solid desktop (probably full AMD)

The vast majority of my Linux experience is in Debian-derived distros like Xubuntu or Ubuntu, so I’d like to stay on the .deb package manager branch. I used to like Ubuntu 20.04 quite a bit, it worked well enough for me and was pretty stable on this laptop, but it’s pretty old now.

My workflow will include darktable, Hugin, digiKam/XNViewMP and related software utilities. I might want to have a distro capable of running audio software too (something like Tracktion Waveform, which apparently does not play well with pipewire).

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Start from the software you want to run and work backwards, checking which distribution supports it.

Personally, I use openSUSE Tumbleweed, with KDE as the GUI. This does all that I need, and Tumbleweed keeps pretty well up-to-date with applications (it was pretty quick releasing DT 5.0, and has a repository that contains the version under development).

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Pretty much any desktop distro is suitable. The only real question is how up-to-date the packages are. Ubuntu and derivatives are typically rather far behind on that point. You may also want to avoid distros that are Wayland first/only, since color management isn’t fully mature there and they will almost certainly be using Pipewire.

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From your request, you might perhaps take a look at
https://ubuntustudio.org/.
(For my own part I’ve used Mint for the last ten years, and am happy with that for my more limited needs.)

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Definitely looks interesting, I’ve heard about it before, but kind of forgot…

From a quick search it seems to be Wayland first though, but Xorg and Pulse Audio should be possible to be enabled

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@epeeist Do you have any experience with other distros? If yes how are they compared with Tumbleweed? I need something stable and at the same time with pretty fresh packages. This rules out Debian, Ubuntu and Arch related distros. Right now I settled on Fedora, but new version 42 is pushing Gnome and Wayland too aggressively. I need fully functional XFCE which seems to be a first-class citizen on Tumbleweed.

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I’ve been using Ubuntu for a long time. I don’t use LTS versions, I upgrade twice a year (a month or so after the new release appears).

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Linux Mint is a reasonable choice of a distro for creative work.

It hasn’t moved to Wayland, and colour management profiles work well!

But being based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, it will eventually be difficult to get newer versions of software without relying on Flatpaks / Appimages / PPAs.

Although on the other hand being less bleeding edge it’s more stable I find.

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Yes, I found non-LTS release of Ubuntu extremely unpredictable in term of stability (at least on my laptop).

Rolling release distros have one key advantage though – if something breaks after an update, it’s easier to track down the issue. Huge updates like LTS to LTS can break a lot of things and may take days to sort out… (personal experience with 20.04 to 22.04)

Mint seems to come with Pulseaudio though, which is one of my requirements

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I have been using Arch for the last six years or so, and haven’t experienced any particular breakage that wasn’t my own fault.

Tumbleweed has some sort of roll-back system. If I wasn’t already using Arch, it’s probably what I would choose.

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Even though I was using Ubuntu, yeah, I admit many breakages were not system’s fault :sweat_smile:

I used Timeshift, that worked well enough for me if something broke beyond repair in reasonable time

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Maybe I need to revisit Arch. I tried it many years ago - not that stable at all. And by that I mean some updates were sort of broken and the whole system would crash under heavy load.

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The answer is always NixOS. Little bit of a learning curve, but stable and super reliable once you get going.

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I have been using Debian testing for two decades now, and it is solid, reliable, and keeps getting better.

It’s a rolling release, so stays reasonably up to date. Lots of people use Unstable for personal laptops, as that’s even closer to upstream. With Testing I am used to waiting weeks or a few months for new releases. Usually that’s fine.

When you do need a new release, it’s usually easy to get it directly from upstream. That’s what I do for RawTherapee. I also compile a few things from source, but none of the photo editing programs have required this.

I appreciate that Debian as a project is super stable, and has been a reliable contributor to the FOSS community for decades. I expect it will be around for many more.

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Pipewire is a drop-in replacement. E.g. pavucontrol works the same.

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What does that mean, i can just uninstall it a put Pulseaudio there? (I haven’t tinkered with Linux for a few years, so I forgot how stuff work a bit)

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If you have Pipewire, apps that worked with Pulseaudio should continue to work without issues. I don’t do audio processing, I just know that as an average user (watching videos, streaming music) I haven’t noticed any changes.

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Long ago, yes. I haven’t changed my distro for a long time though.

You get a choice of GUI, I run KDE but as you say, XFCE is also available. Both X11 and Wayland are available with KDE, but the developers are obviously putting more effort into Wayland.

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I read that there is Pipewire Jack … thing, that people use to run said software, but I don’t know, perhaps I need to ask around.

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Try Manjaro - not so cutting edge like Arch, but based on it. The serious problems (seldom enough) could be solved by booting an older kernel. Or updating the mirror list.