What would you reccomend/use for an alienware laptop m17r5 with amdcpu (idr) and gpu 6850mxt. Idc about adjusting the keyboard lights, I changed it once and never touched it again. I play games like cities skyline, noita, etc. and some vr stuff rarely like vtolvr and warthunder. I use blender and houdinifx.
I’ve seen PopOs reccomended for Blender users but I think thats because it comes with a lot of stuff you need for Nvidia, which isn’t relevant to me with an all amd setup.
Cachyos seems to be the move for best performance with rendering and simulating, was wondering about other options I have since I dont need to worry about nvidia drivers.
I dont like the idea of using ubuntu because of snap packages, but its not a big deal.
While I like tinkering, I do want it to be relatively stable, not suprising me with issues when I need it.
Currently Interested in: CachyOs Debian (leaning towards here if I go the stable route) EndeavorOs Mint (seems popular, is it just simplified?)
EDIT: Went with CachyOs for now, works well, only issue was auto install didn’t work and I needed to manually partition and set the flags for boot and the os drive, other than that it’s been very fast and intuitive using KDE plasma. Recently tried Hyprland with the JaKooLit config, since ML4W didn’t want to work and had bugs, , I like it more than I thought I would.
Might try EndeavorOS and Bazzite on another ssd, they also look interesting.
I would suggest avoidig pure rolling distros then. Also bear in mind that usually the performance difference between distros is not really big enough to make a difference for most things.
I would consider something like Mint. But what I did on my new laptop was that I installed PopOS 24.04 Alpha and used gnome-session (“sudo apt install gnome-session”) on it, though I’ve switched over to COSMIC now as I’m writing apps for it and it works for my games. It’ll get regular kernel+mesa updates but the base os will remain “LTS stable”.
You could also go the Fedora (KDE or GNOME spins) route, it has a regular update schedule, this might be a great option for you.
I was more worried about compatibility and dependencies i might need and not know about, cachy seems to grab a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t think to grab, not sure, installed cachyos and tired to open a steam windows game from my d drive noita and it worked/played fine using wine instantly. Not sure if the others would work as well as that. I think bazzite is based off fedora and also does what cachy does. I’m liking kde plasma, Im also liking a presetup version of hyprland (the 2nd most popular one, hard to remember name)