It seem like you have two problems, finding a distro that runs Ryzen 7 , which is quite new and also which desktop is best for colour management. I am running Ryzen 5 with integrated graphics on Debian sid, as Siduction, this also ensures the latest versions of applications. Any distro with a recent kernel, ( >4.17) mesa and amdgpu driver should work OK. I don’t know how you set your colour profile but using Colorhug https://hughski.com/index.html will calibrate your monitor and generate a profile you can use for your system. I don’t think there should be any difference between any of the desktops, GTK and Plasma work fine together and all apps will run on any distro.
some apps such as darktable more or less depend on colord or xatom. XFCE has no gui for configuring colord or xatom
have you ever tried manjaro? I think it has a very new kernel and if not you can easily (bot do not ask me how) get one
Yes. I am presently on Manjaro/KDE. Works fine.
You could switch to Manjaro Gnome, if you want Gnome. But KDE is probably better for the 4K display.
I tried Fedora in a virtual box yesterday. The iso did not boot when I activated EFI. Maybe I will try it with Vmware.
Could you use display CAL
my experience is that the system forgets sooner or later which profile was set with Displaycal, so setting a profile with displaycal does not work properly
I installed Fedora now in Vmware - does not boot. I think it is because there is no EFI partition.
Hi Anna & thanks.
Actually, I do not think that that is my problem.
I cannot even boot fedora from a Live USB stick!
Try Pop!_OS by the System 76 folks. Runs Gnome 3 and comes with great hardware support baked in. Installed it on a new Lenovo laptop recently, and I’m really liking it. CMS seems very good thus far…
1 Like
Thank you. Will try…
1 Like
why aren’t your satisfied with Manjaro?
Oh, but I am very satisfied with Manjaro/KDE.
But I have been smitten by Distro Fever since the
mid-1990s – and since I read about Richard Hughes’
work with fedora, I was eager to test it.
I thought he just works for Red Hat, his Colord and other colour related work will run on any modern distro and any desktop it is not Fedora specific.
I think I just realized that it would not be so difficult to create a new Linux distro for photographers - just take Manjaro as the base, add all relevant software and some new themes to it and that’s it. Maybe Manjaro is already working on it?
Abends!
Hm… Isn’t that something like Ubuntu Studio and Fedora Spin are aiming at?
Yes they are! But they are - as distros - not as good as Manjaro. Fedora has that confusing installer and Ubuntu is not up to date as far as hardware is concerned. There is no Arch based graphics distro.
I don’t know - just thinking loud.
Eek. That is a highly subjective statement.
Rather than another distro, it’d be nice to put effort into up-to-date distro packages, a la PPA, copr, or OBS, or into distro agnostic packaging, e.g. flatpak, appimage, or snap.
1 Like
What @paperdigits said. You will not get a community of any appreciable size to all agree that such-and-such distro is best. Ever[1]. Providing up to date packages that can be used under different distros will serve more users. And it’s my impression that the good folks here who are working on photography-related projects have their hands full already, and would probably not be eager to add distro maintenance to their workloads.
[1] I have used Manjaro, and liked it. But by no means is it for everyone. To see the level of consensus out there, have a read of this thread:
Well Manjaro is Nr 1 on distrowatch, and recently the journalists at c’t also stated that Arch is the best or at least the most fashionable distro currently, especially as far as hardware is concerned and my experience confirms this. E.g. I have this cheap Epson printer, it could never print properly in color with Ubuntu or Mint but now with Manjaro it does. (However, I also have to admit that a few days ago I got an update from Manjaro and after that my touchpad did not work. I got an external mouse and switched back to an older kernel.) But maybe a Debian (MX?) based “design suite” would not hurt either. If there are people who want to work on such projects.
The important thing with such graphics distros is that fact that you do not need to download and install your programs after the actual installation. They are already there.
All those things that @paperdigits mentioned, appimage, flatpak etc. are important, too, there is no doubt about that.
I mean this is really just… you know… loud thinking 
. Right?
One could even found a hardware company for this new OS … 
One would only need to find some billionaire sponsors
Well… I kind of (almost) always chose the nr 1 distro on distrowatch and the party that was providing or was going to provide the chancellor…