[Aksel]

Spent the day looking at Linux for the OS of a new desktop computer I'm building. A very frustrating day. The latest comprehensive information about the OS and which distro would be best is 4 years old or more.

And the flavors seem endless. Ubuntu. Mint. Cinnamon. Mate.

...

I have Windows 10 Pro (64-bit) and OpenSuse Leap 42.2 KDE (linux) on my desktop and laptop... and love it. I also need some windows programs - that's why i'm dual-booting.
In Linux - I think that (coming from windows-world of thinking) Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSuse are the best alternatives to Windows. KDE - it's (UI) like windows, Gnome - it's something different, but not that hard to understand.

Maybe You will find it interesting:
Ubuntu GNOME vs openSUSE and Fedora

[tuco]

Bear in mind the FOSS community ( Free Open-Source Software) can only develop drivers for printers, wireless, etc if the manufactures release enough information for them to do that or an effort was put in to reverse engineer something. But sometimes drives are made for Linux by some companies.

So secret, proprietary media formats are not well supported in Linux and *BSD systems in general whereas Windows and Mac will workout license agreements and have DRM ( digital rights management) enabled that these big media companies want . And many popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu don't come with some media support out of the box because of legal reasons. You typically have to enable the repositories where you can get these codecs yourself thereby assuming the responsibility of its use. I use to run a Linux desktop many years ago so my info could be dated.

[paulh]

I've been Windows-free for personal use for a while now...And personally, if I post-process, I'll use RawTherapee specifically for its HaldCLUT support. I love Fuji Velvia and Kodachrome filters.

Same here. Dual-booted for awhile, but left MS behind quite a few years ago. My workflow usually involves RawTherapee, then import to digiKam/showFoto for final tweaking. I just installed the HaldClut profiles and anxious to try them out. Currently using the AMAZE profiles and really like them.

[Racer X 69]

Well first, thank you everyone for the terrific response. Lots of great replies, suggestions, links and insight. What a community!

Second, I apologize for not giving the specs on the computer build. I have never bought, "off the shelf", but rather have always researched and assembled components, then install the OS and applications. I've learned quite a bit over the last 20 years doing this, and seen a lot of growth and change.

Here is the latest:

Asus X99-A/USB 3.1 ATX LGA2011-3 Motherboard
Intel Core i7-5820K 3.3GHz 6-Core Processor
Corsair Vengeance LED 64GB (4 x 16GB) DDR4-3200 Memory
Asus GeForce GTX 1070 8GB Video Card
Sandisk X400 1TB 2.5" Solid State Drive (for the OS and apps)

Two Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drives (for a RAID 1 storage drive)



And of course the latest case with a window and trick fans that have fancy LED light shows, and the other ephemera like a power supply.



It should do the trick for running graphics intensive programs. There is room enough for 128 gigs of memory, and the SLI bridge thing looks interesting.



I really didn't have Linux in mind when putting it all together, but a post I saw recently got me interested in a different OS again. I've looked at Linux before, nearly 20 years ago. Red Hat I think. At the time it looked a bit beyond my pay grade, with all the command line work. I've gotten more comfortable with the command line since then, and the newer offerings look like they are more GUI user friendly.

[bertwert]

From my understanding you are just getting into Linux...?

I'd suggest looking at Ubuntu, the Unity desktop is really simple.
Or maybe Debian, with similar to Windows design GUI.
Or about any distro is good... I've got Arch running somewhere...
Why not write your own with Linux From Scratch: LFS Project Homepage
Maybe I should just shut up...

[wombat2go]

Red Hat I think. At the time it looked a bit beyond my pay grade, with all the command line work. I've gotten more comfortable with the command line since then, and the newer offerings look like they are more GUI user friendly.

Yes, Red Hat - I am Fedora since 2007, up to F23 now.
I use it (X86_64) in my day job for industrial modelling - heavy numerical calcs with parallel processes on the I7 cpus.

the Fedora dnf package manager is easy to use, but
use of CLI is still needed to get the stuff working the way you want.
So you are on the way, if you decide to change to linux.

By the way, your hardware is very similar to what i use here,
In addition, i use a NVidia Quattro GPU for 2 purposes:
-Drive a truecolor monitor via Displayport
-Darktable now uses opencl for fast parallel processing on the GPU of big images.

[Racer X 69]

-Drive a truecolor monitor via Displayport

The ASUS card has two of those.

A pair of monitors is on my list. I'm reusing the 27" HP monitors I picked up a year or so back, but I think there is something much better available. Just haven't spent any time looking into it yet.

-Darktable now uses opencl for fast parallel processing on the GPU of big images.

Isn't that what the SLI bridge thing is for? I read a little bit about it, and decided to forego the added cost of a second video card for now. The extra $400 is waiting for some friends to go cover a K-1.

Actually, I cut back on a couple of things on this build, to keep costs down. The last build, about 10 years ago, was only around $1,000. This one cost $2,200. I went down a bit on the processor, and didn't fill the memory slots, and added only 2 drives for storage.

[wombat2go]

The ASUS card has two of those.

You would most likely have to "break" -meaning customise - your chosen linux o/s to get Displayport working
( As I had to here, but don't worry, linux is intended for that.)

I found that if Displayport is running, then there can be some problems with video on internet ( html5 etc is not yet compatible)
Also the bios and grub might not display anything until the X terminal is booted, which is a nuisance.
So I use a script run on boot to select xterm to DVI ( general use) or Displayport ( photos).

Best to stay on DVI until all else is settled.

[ashurbanipal]

As far as printing goes, you could give TurboPrint a try. Non-free software, but has a 30-day trial and your printer is listed as supported. I've never had to try it myself since my laser printer works fine with Kubuntu and for the few times I print photo prints instead of getting them at the local shop, I can use my wife's Windows laptop.

As far as distro recommendations, I like Kubuntu as it's been pretty solid for me as long as I stick with the LTS releases. I settled on KDE by trying a bunch of different distributions on live CD; Ubuntu worked best with my hardware and KDE just clicked for me, so it made it pretty easy. I'd probably take a closer look at OpenSuse if I were building a new machine, but I'm pretty happy with Kubuntu 16.04. My use case is quite a bit different for yours, though, as I'm using it on a machine that's pushing 4 years old and wasn't exactly highly spec'd when I built it.

As far as software goes, for image-related stuff I'd recommend darktable for raw development, Digikam for organization and light editing, and GIMP for heavier editing. RawTherapee seems to get high marks but it's never been a good fit with me personally, although I see they've just released a new major version so it'd definitely be worth checking out as well. As far as I know there's nothing comparable to the Autodesk stuff; I use QCAD, but my needs are extremely simple (2D only, for one thing) and it's certainly not on the same level.

--Steve

[Racer X 69]

Best to stay on DVI until all else is settled.

One thing I found odd was that the current crop of video cards only have one DVI connector, but two display ports and two HDMI ports, unless you want to spend lots of money.

For now I'm going with the HDMI setup, as the monitors support that. I had them on the DVI cables as the Nvidia Quadro board in the old XP Pro machine had dual DVI.

[newmikey]

I've looked at Linux before, nearly 20 years ago. Red Hat I think. At the time it looked a bit beyond my pay grade, with all the command line work. I've gotten more comfortable with the command line since then, and the newer offerings look like they are more GUI user friendly.

Ha, I think I remember that version. It came on an great number of individual 1.4Mb floppy disks which had to be inserted/ejected when the (non-graphical) installer indicated it. I still have a promo baseball cap that came with the RH package: white with red letters.

You will find the world has changed considerably since then: graphical installers, live systems, graphical package managers, compatibility with Windows filesystems and really swooshy and themed graphical desktops with wobbly windows and 3D effects. I'm sure you'll enjoy!

[jbinpg]

Check out this page on the Phoronix test site to see what opencl acceleration can do for darktable:

20-Way NVIDIA/AMD GPU Darktable OpenCL Photography Performance - Phoronix

Your GTX 1070 will be a screamer.

[damianc]

I'll add a couple of recommendations here as a Linux user of over 20 years:
The package management on openSuSE is superb and probably one of the most robust out there. I also find VMWare player to be more stable and quicker than VirtualBox for running virtual machines (which incidentally are a great last resort if you can't get specific functionality from FOSS tools, and far less frustrating than dual boot). I even have a virtual Hackintosh to play around with now and then. The specs out for your machine should make VMs perform superbly.

[The Squirrel Mafia]

Well first, thank you everyone for the terrific response. Lots of great replies, suggestions, links and insight. What a community!

Second, I apologize for not giving the specs on the computer build. I have never bought, "off the shelf", but rather have always researched and assembled components, then install the OS and applications. I've learned quite a bit over the last 20 years doing this, and seen a lot of growth and change.

Here is the latest:

Asus X99-A/USB 3.1 ATX LGA2011-3 Motherboard
Intel Core i7-5820K 3.3GHz 6-Core Processor
Corsair Vengeance LED 64GB (4 x 16GB) DDR4-3200 Memory
Asus GeForce GTX 1070 8GB Video Card
Sandisk X400 1TB 2.5" Solid State Drive (for the OS and apps)

Two Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drives (for a RAID 1 storage drive)



And of course the latest case with a window and trick fans that have fancy LED light shows, and the other ephemera like a power supply.



It should do the trick for running graphics intensive programs. There is room enough for 128 gigs of memory, and the SLI bridge thing looks interesting.



I really didn't have Linux in mind when putting it all together, but a post I saw recently got me interested in a different OS again. I've looked at Linux before, nearly 20 years ago. Red Hat I think. At the time it looked a bit beyond my pay grade, with all the command line work. I've gotten more comfortable with the command line since then, and the newer offerings look like they are more GUI user friendly.

Fedora is probably going to be your best bet here. It has the latest Linux software available. It's now even easier to update your desktop to the next release with the "fedup" command.

I still like Debian the most, but it tends to lag a few versions behind in software. Sometimes you have to manually look for firmware for newer devices when installing Debian. This can be a bit challenging for someone that is starting to use a Linux system. But yeah! Once installed & running, it takes a lot to break a Debian installation. It's insanely stable, but once again, at the cost of having software a few versions behind.

[bertwert]

Once installed & running, it takes a lot to break a Debian installation

Go to root folder...
sudo rm -rf *