I’m actually a little scared of running Linux on modern, fast hardware.
How is multi-GPU driver support?
My main machine is a 900 TFlops compute monster (4 GPUs) running ROCM on Windows, and the last time I’d tried Manjaro on Desktop, it seized up for unknown reasons.
I’ve got asynchronous monitors - 1440p@165Hz main display and 4K@85Hz flipped vertical for a side monitor. Occasionally, I plug in a projector which is 1080p, mirrored to the 4K, but flipped horizontal.
I’m not sure what I’d done wrong because it works perfectly on my 11 year old Z575 (Debian+KDE there).
What distro would you recommend for an extremely fast/high RAM machine? I’ve got 128GB of main system memory, and 4TB of M.2 for a system disk running at 7.6 gigabytes/second actual/real-world RW I/O.
I would suggest if you want some up-to-date awesomeness, try OpenSUSE Tumbleweed!
Rolling release sounds scary, but even aside from enabling BTRFS snapshots by default, it’s surprisingly stable, and has proprietary NVIDIA drivers!
Granted, I don’t game (that’s all my Win10 partition is for right now lol), but I do Blender and other creative tasks snd it’s amazingly snappy and fun.
Wayland is “getting there” on a user experience level, but as for buttery smooth frame rates and stuff, it feels like a new machine on my 144hz / 60hz dual monitor setup.
I’m running a single 3090, but I’m sure it could handle dual-GPU!
Tumbleweed is a bit of a spooky name for a distro implying that a gentle breeze sends it, but y’know
Linux Mint as someone suggested, I’ve ran a long time ago for college on an ancient laptop, and it’s an extreme stable OS, similar to Windows 2000 Pro. I can’t remember it crashing or freezing even once on me, and the Thinkpad T42 has an anemic processor., which I ran with the Conservative Governor
Totally feel ya on Mint. I put it on my X230 just now because I wasn’t planning on booting it up too often and didn’t want a massive update causing issues down the line. Super stable, super user friendly. I always recommend it to newcomers. Lovely experience!
Haha yeah Tumbleweed is an interesting name. Suppose it’s because it’s always “rollin’ rollin’ rollin’”. Constantly in motion!
I’d caution against it on low-data capped internet plans for instance, because it updates fairly often, sometimes 1GB or more. But also plenty of people update like once a week and it’s good. I update pretty much every day. It’s kinda compulsive for me and I like to see if anything is fixed or new. :p
So that’s one cool thing it has over *buntu and friends: Newest and shiniest features, but they’ve been tested a bit more thoroughly than on something like Arch, and if it does go bad, you can boot into a “snapshot” and wait until a newer update hopefully fixes whatever borked it.
But I haven’t had to roll back in ages. :)
I like keeping on the edge of KDE6 right now because it’s improving very quickly. Same with Wayland, even though some programs are still fussy with it. (You can have X11 and Wayland both, and choose which to use upon login)
I’ve installed it on my (single) AMD GPU (I thought it was for something else) on EndeavourOS (which is, obvs, arch btw :D).
I’ve been using endeavourOS for about 1y now, after a few years of Mint (and 20years of everything else. Yes, I’ve used gentoo as well back when it was only install from stage1). It does feel faster (on the same hw) but I’ve never done any real benchmarking, so it could be just “new shiny feeling faster”. I’ve found an article a few weeks ago comparing boot/compression speeds of different distros. In your particular case I wouldn’t be using Debian as I feel you’d need quite up-to-date drivers, and Debian is conservative (and that’s a good thing personally, I use it on my servers).
Just install Linux Mint and be done. Just a side note but there is no such thing as “drivers” like there are on Windows. Everything is baked into the kernel. If you run Nvidia you will need to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers. These aren’t like Windows drivers but they are external.
Uh, if they want to use ROCm (kinda like CUDA, but for AMD), they do have to install it manually. It is available for some distros, so that hopefully shouldn’t be a problem.
I’m actually a little scared of running Linux on modern, fast hardware.
How is multi-GPU driver support?
My main machine is a 900 TFlops compute monster (4 GPUs) running ROCM on Windows, and the last time I’d tried Manjaro on Desktop, it seized up for unknown reasons.
I’ve got asynchronous monitors - 1440p@165Hz main display and 4K@85Hz flipped vertical for a side monitor. Occasionally, I plug in a projector which is 1080p, mirrored to the 4K, but flipped horizontal.
I’m not sure what I’d done wrong because it works perfectly on my 11 year old Z575 (Debian+KDE there).
What distro would you recommend for an extremely fast/high RAM machine? I’ve got 128GB of main system memory, and 4TB of M.2 for a system disk running at 7.6 gigabytes/second actual/real-world RW I/O.
I would suggest if you want some up-to-date awesomeness, try OpenSUSE Tumbleweed!
Rolling release sounds scary, but even aside from enabling BTRFS snapshots by default, it’s surprisingly stable, and has proprietary NVIDIA drivers!
Granted, I don’t game (that’s all my Win10 partition is for right now lol), but I do Blender and other creative tasks snd it’s amazingly snappy and fun.
Wayland is “getting there” on a user experience level, but as for buttery smooth frame rates and stuff, it feels like a new machine on my 144hz / 60hz dual monitor setup.
I’m running a single 3090, but I’m sure it could handle dual-GPU!
Sure, I’ll try OpenSUSE!
Tumbleweed is a bit of a spooky name for a distro implying that a gentle breeze sends it, but y’know
Linux Mint as someone suggested, I’ve ran a long time ago for college on an ancient laptop, and it’s an extreme stable OS, similar to Windows 2000 Pro. I can’t remember it crashing or freezing even once on me, and the Thinkpad T42 has an anemic processor., which I ran with the Conservative Governor
Totally feel ya on Mint. I put it on my X230 just now because I wasn’t planning on booting it up too often and didn’t want a massive update causing issues down the line. Super stable, super user friendly. I always recommend it to newcomers. Lovely experience!
Haha yeah Tumbleweed is an interesting name. Suppose it’s because it’s always “rollin’ rollin’ rollin’”. Constantly in motion!
I’d caution against it on low-data capped internet plans for instance, because it updates fairly often, sometimes 1GB or more. But also plenty of people update like once a week and it’s good. I update pretty much every day. It’s kinda compulsive for me and I like to see if anything is fixed or new. :p
So that’s one cool thing it has over *buntu and friends: Newest and shiniest features, but they’ve been tested a bit more thoroughly than on something like Arch, and if it does go bad, you can boot into a “snapshot” and wait until a newer update hopefully fixes whatever borked it.
But I haven’t had to roll back in ages. :)
I like keeping on the edge of KDE6 right now because it’s improving very quickly. Same with Wayland, even though some programs are still fussy with it. (You can have X11 and Wayland both, and choose which to use upon login)
well ROCM is supported in Linux https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/install-on-linux/en/latest/
I’ve installed it on my (single) AMD GPU (I thought it was for something else) on EndeavourOS (which is, obvs, arch btw :D).
I’ve been using endeavourOS for about 1y now, after a few years of Mint (and 20years of everything else. Yes, I’ve used gentoo as well back when it was only install from stage1). It does feel faster (on the same hw) but I’ve never done any real benchmarking, so it could be just “new shiny feeling faster”. I’ve found an article a few weeks ago comparing boot/compression speeds of different distros. In your particular case I wouldn’t be using Debian as I feel you’d need quite up-to-date drivers, and Debian is conservative (and that’s a good thing personally, I use it on my servers).
Just install Linux Mint and be done. Just a side note but there is no such thing as “drivers” like there are on Windows. Everything is baked into the kernel. If you run Nvidia you will need to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers. These aren’t like Windows drivers but they are external.
Uh, if they want to use ROCm (kinda like CUDA, but for AMD), they do have to install it manually. It is available for some distros, so that hopefully shouldn’t be a problem.
Fedora now ships with ROCm. I don’t think it is completely ready yet but its a start.