hi, please could you suggest what flavour of Linux I could go for for a PC I’m going to build mainly for RT and Gimp. What I’m particularly interested in is the trade-off between flexibility/capability and the need to be techy. I programmed years ago, so am not hopeless tech-wise, but I don’t want to be spending lots of time with command line stuff. I’m more familiar with Windows; haven’t done much with Linux, but want to gradually move over to it (for everything). I have Ubuntu on a laptop and have used it for day-to-day browsing, plus I did once install RT, but I’m still a novice at Ubuntu. Having said all that, I accept I may need to invest in learning to compile RT and/or Gimp. But I read in Pixls the other day there are also self-contained Appimages, so that sounds good.
So back to the question… what flavour do you recommend for me please?
For the PC, I’m intending a decent processor (i5 or i7) plus one of those SSDs that plug straight into the PCI bus. I fancy i7 in which case I’m going to try the built-in graphics before buying a card. Does that sounds like a bad idea? (I’m not into gaming)
Nothing wrong with Ubuntu. In Ubuntu, you should add Darius Dumas PPA to your list of software repositories. To add the PPA use the instructions from the RawTherapee Blog:
Absolutely nothing wrong with Ubuntu, I agree. I fancy Ubuntu Mate, as the Mate desktop is lightweight and follows a very traditional desktop metaphor.
If not Ubuntu or Ubuntu flavor, OpenSUSE has an awsome graphical confih manager called YaST. You could also try Solus, a very opinionated, desktop only, rolling distro.
I use (K)Ubuntu. The good thing about it is that it usually works on about any hardware (and can often take advantage of its special capabilities, and not just remain in “tolerance” mode).
Otherwise avoid server-oriented distros, which often use fairly old code (code freeze occurs several years before publication).
Depending on what you do you might miss the GPU. Darktable does have at least some open-cl support and so does gegl/gimp. For problems that map nicely to it and are optimized well you can get a big speed up from it.
In a recent (and simplistic) case, I managed to outperform a small 100 core cluster with a single gaming grade GPU when working on an optimization problem.
The speed ups I have seen in darktable are quite a bit smaller. For Gimp & RT which you explicitly mention I’m not sure if a fast graphics card will make any difference at all.
Another Ubuntu user here. I run it on a couple of laptops, and in general it “just runs”. The only gotcha I’ve encountered is that Ubuntu is not among the distributions that contains support for exFAT file systems. My Nikon D7000 formats large SD cards (more than 32 GB) with exFAT, so it was necessary to install exfat-fuse and exfat-utils in order to work with these cards. Not terribly difficult once you’ve separated good advice from bad, but I mention it since you said you were trying to minimize command line activities.
I’m running Linux on an i7. So far I’m just using the built-in graphics as this means less heat and less noise, not to mention less upfront cost when we built the computer. I build and run GIMP-2.9, RT, DT, PhotoFlow, and a lot of other software from source. Compile times are relatively fast and the softwares all run with a decent responsiveness, all things considered (well, “all things considered” covers a lot of ground).
I would recommend that you max out your RAM. My motherboard supports 32GB RAM and that’s what we installed. This allows me to set up a tmp RAM disk for compiling software and such, which minimizes writes to disk. I put the operating system on an SSD card, and that’s also where I put the “compiled from source” code. I wish I had a second SSD card for saving to disk the images I’m currently working on, instead of having them write to a “spinning rust” type hard drive. But we had a budget and between “more RAM” and “another SSD card and/or an actual graphics card”, more RAM took priority.
If I had an unlimited budget I would have gone for a dual CPU board that allowed for twice as much RAM. Realistically I have to work really hard to get my RAM usage anywhere near 32GB. But if you planned to use software like Blender, I bet you could occupy 32GB RAM and wish you had more.
I’ve been running Gentoo Linux for several years now, but that flavor of Linux has a steep learning curve. Previously I ran Debian, and then Ubuntu, and then OpenSUSE, and all are good distributions. OpenSUSE and Ubuntu both supply a lot of prebuilt but very current software available from unofficial repositories, and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed means you never have to upgrade, the trade-off being dealing with complications of keeping up with Tumbleweed. I really did like OpenSUSE YAST even though I’m reasonably comfortable using the command line. Also Ubuntu and OpenSUSE both have nice user forums where people tend to be helpful and knowledgeable. Good user forums are important when using Linux.