Hey, I'm looking to set up linux next to my win11 (and keep win11 for steam and as a backup) and I'm looking for a distro mainly for internet browsing and photography editing (GIMP, Rawtherapee).

I would prefer something for a newbie (I only had some experience with Ubuntu MATE - I was happy with it overall except GUI) that is stable, secure and a bit faster than win11 (doesn't need to be super lightweight). I have HP laptop with AMD Ryzen 5 3500U with Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx 2.10 GHz with 16GB RAM and SSD drive.

I've ran few distros and I'm leaning towards Ubuntu Budgie, Studio, Zorin, Mint Cinnamon but still want to test OpenSuse Tumbleweed, Fedora Workstation and the rest of Ubuntu family (except MATE which is a No).

So, my questions are:
- Does any of the above listed distros (or any distro for that matter) stands out when it comes photography editing (color space, application performance etc.) or any distro will be fine as long as it supports applications I'm going to use?
- I've been running a bunch of distros using live USB to test them out but some just won't boot from USB and it's booting straight to windows (USB is a priority for boot). I had this problem with a few distros and all of them had hybridISO and I had to use dd mode when creating bootable USB in Rufus (sorry if I'm not making any sense, first time here...)

If anyone could point me in the right direction or has some tips, I would really appreciate that. Thanks!

It has been my experience that the image manipulation software used, e.g., The Gimp, is more important than the distribution.
With that in mind, you might consider, https://download.liveslak.org/

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No desktop distribution stands out as being better than any other for photoediting.

Discaimer: the only one on your list that I've used is OpenSuse; I've tried a couple of *buntus after having some Linux experience but couldn't live with any of them for more than a couple of hours. And it's worth adding that I probably couldn't live with OpenSuse now.

I personally found OpenSuse a pretty painless transition from windows to Linux. Now I'm on Slackware using Raw Therapee and GIMP (and having mixed success in transitioning to Krita) without any problems.

Only had live USB experience with Slackware so I can't help there, sorry.

And welcome to the forums.

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MX Linux. Very user friendly, helpful forum, great tools.

https://mxlinux.org/

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I would think any mainstream distro would be fine. As cwizardone said, it's the software tools, not the distro.

If force to choose, I'd be inclined to recommend Mint.

I also recommend this site for learning about the GIMP. The video tutorials are excellent. https://meetthegimp.org/

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I too would suggest a larger distro. Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian or OpenSuse as they all tend to have the most software available. While you may only need Gimp now that doesn't mean you may need extra image format support or other programs or video.

If you want a very fast distro that requires work then Clear Linux is a benchmark for speed.

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Color management is not addressed at all by some of the simpler GUIs out there; I'm sure the 3 big ones (XFCE, KDE, GNOME) have that set up.
That said, it isn't too much work to make your system initialise it.
About performance, I have been wondering if it is possible to offload photo editing tasks to the GPU, just like it can be done with video decoding. And if yes, whether GIMP or some other Linux graphics application offers that. That might make a difference.

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I've installed VMware and tried running few of the above distors on virtual machine.

Most of them worked super slow but I guess that's because I was running live mode on VM, right? MX Linux seemed pretty slow.

Slackware I wasn't able to run at all on VM. After logging in as live user I just saw the logo and though it was loading but then just turned to a black screen, any ideas what could be wrong?

Thanks for all the replies!

looks like you have a low end machine or probably you configured incorrectly those VMs. Anyway if you want to do photography editing do not use VMs.

It's not great but ryzne 5 and 15gb ram should be enough to run the distro. Anyways I've created bootable USB with Slackware and tried to run it but got an error saying "Verification failed: (0x1A) Security Violation...

EDIT: Nnv, decided to with one of the three: MX, Zorin, Kubuntu. I'll just test them more and then decide

^ Of those, MX Linux is certainly the lightest.

It appears that GPU offloading is a thing for image editing, and Darktable can do it.
Might be worth checking out with your AMD system.

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I will definitely try it.

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Yes, it looks like darktable is a very good choice (obviously if you have no other favorite tool). Using VM will slow down the system and the tool you use, therefore it is not really recommended. From the other hand [amlost] any distro will work [almost] the same way, it is not that important, at least non of them will have significantly better performance. So choose what you prefer.

Have to agree with others here; it's not the OS so much in this case, as the software itself.

• RawTherapee
• GIMP
• DarkTable

.....and another you might be interested in, the KDE Project's native 'Digikam', are all available as AppImages. These things are like the PortableApps some Windows users like to run; one app, will run anywhere.

Download 'em, make 'em executable, click on 'em to run. They unpack into, and run from /tmp for the duration.

Another you may be interested in is XNView:-

https://www.xnview.com/en/


Mike.

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