Good distros for production/games?
 

I'm a gamer and also getting into production on the PC. All of the games I play are on Steam, so I need a distro that supports Steam (Steam works on Fedora as someone is maintaining it I believe) AND also Skype as I play games with my friends. Other than gaming is production, which is basically making add-ons for games, so I need a good IDE such as Eclipse and Code::Blocks and then Autodesk Maya. When im doing this type of work I do enjoy listening to music in the background, so Spotify also has to work (its a must). Now any IDE should work on any distro no? Autodesk Maya however is intended to be ran on RHEL/Fedora distros which is leading me to use something like Fedora (however GNOME Shell has the worst performance for games by some reviews, same with KDE?). Spotify is meant for Debian/Ubuntu although I have seen some .RPMS for Fedora but the icon is very blurry for me which is a con. I have tried Arch Linux before with gaming and the performance is horrible (Ive tried Manjaro only actually, not Arch itself, Spotify worked great, havent tried Maya).

What distros would you recommend for me? I am leaning towards Fedora KDE version however people say it affects gaming performance, the XFCE version looks ugly to me.

EDIT: Currently I am using Ubuntu and I managed to get everything working except I dont have Autodesk Composite or Backburner due to it being on ubuntu (I dont use it but its nice to have) and Skype doesnt work, it crashes on calls (seems to be an ubuntu problem microsoft has yet fixed). Other than that Ubuntu would be a fine choice for me.

Well, Fedora is worked towards programmers. I use it to build software, but I don't see why it shouldn't work with wine/gaming (I think that is what you mean?)
Since I don't use Skype, I can't tell you whether it is or is not working on Fedora - but since M$ took that one over, I don't know... well, you know... if my penguin won't... mysteriously choke on it and die. Or something like that. "Accidents" happen.
Anyway, Ubuntu is just perfect for gaming on wine. Did it for more than three years, and, to be honest, with a bit of fiddling, there isn't much that won't run, one way or another.
Also, Ubuntu is based on Debian, and you'll find way more resources on the net that help you setting it up and working with it. It's just a beginner's / switcher's distro, and it does a great job (and if you work on it, you don't really need to dig deep before you find the Debian in Ubuntu.
If you want to check out Fedora (Which is really interesting if your focus is software development), check the Gnome version as well. It's quite pretty (IMHO), quite fast if you have an accelerated graphics card, and I think it's also much clearer than KDE (But that remains an opinion, I went away from KDE a long time ago. I checked out its development from time to time, to see if it became more of what I wanted it to be, but Gnome actually was more of my liking. Something personal). Unfortunately, there is more to do by yourself than on Ubuntu, and a bit less resources on the net.

i have run steam games on Fedora Gnome shell with zero problems and very good performance.

Ubuntu works well too. If you are running a newer Nvidia video care for now id say stick with Ubuntu, just make sure to opt-out of their stupid spyware. that is if it is even possible to opt-out of it or better yet remove it from your system all together.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/ubuntu-spyware.html

that is exactly why i avoid ubuntu like the plague, but i was just reading on slashdot today about a massive improvement to the Ubuntu Nvidia drivers:

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/0...ort-as-windows

if you can remove the spyware built into Ubuntu it would be a better gaming platform for steam then just about any other out there right now.

I do like ubuntu, you can disable recording activity and the amazon search and completely remove the shopping lens, I also agree with you it is good for gaming however theres a bug in it with Skype and also Maya worked on ubuntu as well except for some reason it just crapped out on me (crashes everytime I open it). Could you give me a link on how to install AMD video drivers on Fedora? I have tried it a while ago by manually installing AMD drivers and the OS itself didnt even load after that (obviously I did something wrong), Steam also kept crashing due to SELinux, should I disable it?

EDIT: It seems that KMod in the RPMFusion repo does not have AMD Drivers for the 3.10 kernel so I will need to wait a while. What would be the second best distro for me, OpenSUSE? (besides arch as I sort of want to save that as a last resort)

If you want to run Fedora, but need an older kernel, a trip to koji and a search on kernel will let you grab an older kernel (and the headers and devel packages) needed to use the kmod packages in rpmfusion. It's a bit of a pain, but I often need to do this on my desktop PC (which uses the nouveau driver when it works, and the nvidia driver when nouveau doesn't play nicely with my onboard graphics)

so far as SELinux goes, DO NOT DISABLE it, just set it to permissive. much less hassle that way and you can still use it when you need to assist in locking down your system.

as for AMD and Fedora 19:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTM5Nzg

Fedora 19 has native support for AMD out of the box.

I guess I can partly answer your question - I play Counter Strike and Half Life on Steam on Fedora 19 - with zero problems. Skype also works well here as does google talk plugin (google+, google chat, etc).

So, I would definitely recommend Fedora for Steam. However, it also depends on whether the games you play are available for Linux (something you would probably have checked already anyway).

Also, I always have SELinux on permissive mode. Steam works fine, so far, at least.

Hope this helps. Cheers.

Ubuntu is the worst distro for gaming I have used, no offense to Ubuntu users.

You said what you wanted to do, but not really how. Gentoo & Slackware are the more stable platforms for games IMHO, and Fedora should work decently for what you want to do with most of the packages already compiled. Bot of course for stability on your system coupled with the fact that you are programming, I cant sress enough that you should build from source using propper flags no matter what distro you choose.