Hello everybody,

Something we are noticing is the increasing use of the Linux OS, attracting developers and users alike who wants to be part of this.

I am looking that more and more engines, programs and tools among others, are making their services available to Linux.

As a new game developer, I want to know what is the "best" (or more used, has te best features, good performance, etc) Linux Distribution to start using all this tools and making my games?

Thanks everybody for your time.

I guess Ubuntu is the way to go right now.

Together with QtCreator I've been able to get productive pretty quick, being a Linux Noob myself.

Maybe you also want to take a look at Bruce Dawson excellent presentation about

Debuggung/Programming using Ubuntu and QtCreator

From Gauthier, our best Linux programmer here at Fishing Cactus:

The distribution you chose won't affect the performances, as it depends more on kernel/drivers you are using.

Maybe avoid Debian if you want to use newer tools as they won't stable so not in main repositories.

Ubuntu can be good if you like that kind of predefined environment.

Archlinux may also be a good choice if you prefer user-defined environment.

ps: Gauthier uses Archlinux.

Slackware is another user defined environment distro.

The things they deliver are working well.

QtCreator worked out of the box.

But you have to compile a lot yourself. They seem sometimes a bit outdated like me too.

The best distribution to start with is the one you happen to have installed already. Do your development there.

After that, you will need several just to verify that everything works. That likely means relying on pre-existing multi-system compiler farms, or downloading and testing on SUSE, Red Hat and Fedora, Debian and the *buntu family, Mint, and anything else you can get your hands on. Several groups like DistroWatch.com provide an ever-changing list of the top major distributions, cover the best spread you can manage.


If you are asking which is the best one to install for your very first linux distro, that is an enormous holy war that would get your topic moved over to the Lounge so reputations don't suffer too much. It is better asked at sites like the above-mentioned DistroWatch where there are detailed comparisons about the differences and similarities between the major players.

Ubuntu and family are the most popular ones, especially on the consumer side. To me, they have always felt like the entry level consumer distros.. Personally I'd recommend OpenSUSE with KDE. It's slightly more intermediate user targeted, and slightly more "professional" (as in "made for work tasks"). One of the main features of OpenSUSE is an install tool which will let you tweak lots of things about your installation, including packages such as development tools or various servers, which makes it easy to get up and running quickly.

I would suggest use the distribution you prefer (they are all pretty similar).

You may want to use Ubuntu because it is one of the most popular so you know that your software is likely to work on other installs of that distribution.

(At the same time you should make sure to statically compile any libraries so that distribution specific library conflicts are avoided.)

Sometime a boring stable distribution is best (Like Debian) so you do not need to keep updating your workflow to match the whims of the latest hip and trendy Linux feature (in particular systemd, Wayland (and to some extent SDL2.0)). This is probably also the reason why SteamOS is based on Debian.

Ubuntu and mint are very user friendly, so you probably want to start using those. Also, since they are very popular, you may find a lot of packages ready to install for them, which saves time from downloading the source and instaling yourself and updating.

I like Linux Mint the best of the currently available distributions. Game development doesn't really impact it one way or the other.

Back when I still tried to use Linux as a desktop OS, I found Fedora to be pretty decent as a development OS. I may be biased since I was a Fedora packager, but generally there was always an up-to-date RPM of whatever I needed, and a lot of the cutting-edge development of Linux the OS itself is driven by Fedora developers so it's a good place to be if you like things up to date.

These days I find Windows 8.1 to be the best environment to do all real development and then just use a Linux box for porting/testing after the game is already up and running and debugged and playable. If you're careful, making a game that runs on Windows, Linux, and OSX with minimal porting work is pretty easy. Use only cross-platform libraries (SDL2, OpenGL, Wwise, Qt, C++ standard library, etc.) and most of the porting work will be updating the build system to know how to compile on a new OS.