Everyone overthinks it, and you are too.

Mint is great. It may not work for you if you have super new hardware.

Fedora is great. It’s mint but with newer stuff.

Arch is great. Bleeding edge. But it’s not “set it and forget it”.

Linux is great. There’s a million other options. Any of them work if they work for you. Find someone bashing Ubuntu - they would HAPPILY choose Ubuntu over win11.

And you have to realize the “what version I’m on dependency hell” thing is a thing of the past for the most part. Flatpaks just about solve this problem. You’ve got containers and vms too. Switching to another distro ain’t hard either as a nuclear option.

Just install mint or fedora like everyone says. Your requirements aren’t special, and both options are great.

I’m looking at suse tumbleweed for an upcoming build. Ubuntu is getting obnoxious, mint is ugly and way behind on Wayland support and fedora I can’t really trust at this point as it’s a community version of a corporate American product. Like I could ignore the corporate stink before but -gestures broadly- not in this climate.

I liked arch but now that bcacheFS is getting yanked out of the kernel I don’t really have a reason to manually do so much myself anymore.

Update: installed mint and i am excited so far. didn’t test unreal yet, but gaming perf was great. Customization is really cool and i already got it to look modern with some theme icon combinations. Made a 🥭 in gimp as my home icon. Ran into very little issues so far. Except for one, where suspend instantly wakes up the pc and is therefore unusable. But i will figure that out another day.

I tried UE5 on Debian Testing and it seemed to work fine.

If it works there, it’ll probably work on almost anything.

Personally, I dislike Ubuntu, but if it’s been working for you, you shouldn’t have problems.

I really like Debian and think it’s not too difficult, but it isn’t for everyone and might not be your thing.

EDIT: Looking at the website for UE5, almost any distro released in the past 3 years should do the trick so long as the distro works on your hardware.

Coming from Windows, OK with a bit of tech journey and into gaming here is my take in no order of preference.

1. TuxedoOS if you are inclined to Debian/Ubuntu side. Slow updates but it has latest KDE and very stable in my experience.
2. If you just want set and forget (minimal updates) Linux Mint (Ubuntus fall here too) Now, it is not very appealing aesthetics.
3. Fedora. Probably the best overall, but if you have beef against IBM/Red Hat, ditch it, its superiority is very marginal. Gamers like the spin Nobara, some performance increase but minimal.
4. Arch is not that unstable as portrayed, but one time in a critical time is bad enough, even if very rarely occurs. You assess your risk. The popular baby today is Arch’s CachyOS due to catering to gamers.
5. OpenSUSE’s Tumbleweed is maintained quite good and very close to Fedora in being perfect overall, but fewer people behind and less support. I would only go with it if you have a specific reason why (German, Yast tools, rolling release but stable,…)

At the end, like many people say, it is likely you will hop… until one day you find that distro hoping is pointless and that all are actually very close to each other and could easily coexist with any of them all. The difficult and uncompromising aspect usually is with the desktop environment like KDE Plasma, Gnome, Cinnamon…

OpenSUSE, you can rollback your OS if an update, or your own mistake, borks it. GUI interface for a lot of stuff. It defaults to enforcing Secure Linux these days. This is a good thing but means extra steps if you want to access certain things remotely, so you can set it to complain or off, instead of the enforcing setting.

For the new people on Linux, think of my impression playing with the different OS;

Similarities between Windows 10 and macOS is around 15%.

Similarities between Windows 10 and Linux Mint is around 20%.

Similarities between Linux Mint and Ubuntu is around 95%.

Similarities between Linux Mint and Fedora\OpenSUSE is around 90%.

Similarities between Linux Mint and Arch\CachyOS\Manjaro is around 85%.

And with Flatpaks/Snaps I would even now narrow the difference in the Linus OS as 95, 92 and 90% similarity. For what linux cannot do for you, unless it needs high processing or gaming anticheats, a Virtual Machine with Windows will just cover you without any problem.

What makes look different in Linux is the desktop environment (KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon…), no much the distro per se. Find the distro environment you like after playing 20min with it, and choose the Linux flavor you are ideologically/persuaded with the most… don’t worry about the rest.

Go with Bazzite, if you don’t like it, just switch. You only need to backup one folder, your /home dir.

I read a lot of advice online for distros, but my main needs are not really discussed.

You’re not special and Linux distros aren’t that specialized. They differ in packaging, upgrade philosophy, etc. There is no Linux distro that can’t do the things others do.

You dabbled with Ubuntu. Stick with it, you’ll be fine. Unless you really want mint, then go for it you’ll be fine.

arch seems the coolest, with Wayland, kde, hyperland customization

While I have no experience with Unreal Engine, so I can’t give an informed recommendation, I just figured I’d point out that you can do this with every distro

I don’t recommend Bazzite. I’m far from an expert (I’ve only used Mint), but I see a lot of people recommending Bazzite. You should definitely test on Bazzite, but it’s immutable and so that’ll probably cause a lot of issues. I’d recommend strongly against Bazzite for gamedev.

I think basically any major distro will work (Ubuntu, Mint, OpenSUSE, Arch). You’ll probably need to run the software in bottles, so if it supports bottles then it should work for your needs. Only go with Arch if you’re willing to sign up for some extra work.

Be sure to make backups. That way it won’t matter if you brick your OS.

EDIT: It supports Linux, I was on the wrong page. It explicitly supports Red Hat (Fedora) and Rocky Linux, OpenSUSE is similar to them, so go with one of those three I guess.

EDIT 2: They recommend Ubuntu. Test on Ubuntu and Rocky. I’d go with Rocky just because I hate Ubuntu (on an emotional level, I don’t think they’re evil or anything).

As a game dev I prefer Arch-base (I’m using EndeavourOS) and I use Godot. However if you think Arch may not be for you, then I suggest Fedora.

but my main needs are not really discussed

…

So in essence i need something stable that is relatively easy to use and has great ue5 and gaming perf.

That is probably the most common set of requirements people ask for. In reality, with a few exceptions, there is really not that much difference between distros given those requirements. UE5 is newer so the biggest change there would be that you might find distros that ship newer versions of stuff might run it slightly better then distros that ship older software. In practice I think it has been out for long enough that you wont see much difference unless you want to play something new on the day of release (but these days those are all buggy messes anyway… not sure your choice of distro will make as big a difference as waiting a few weeks/months for the initial patches to rollout).

Remember, all distros are essentially based off the same software, the biggest difference being what desktop environment they ship with and what versions of software there ship (and how how long they stay on that version). By far the biggest difference you will see if what desktop environment they use and all distros essentially package the same set of desktop environments - each might come with different ones by default but they typically contain all the popular ones in their repos.

i need something stable… great gaming perf

In particular these two points. Do you know what you are asking for here? These are the most bland and wishy washy requirements. Everyone wants something stable and fast, never seen anyone ask for something that crashes all the time and is slow. But worst these tend to be on the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of requirements, if you optimize for one you tend to trade off the other.

Even stability has multiple meanings. In terms of crash stability you will find all distros to be about the same. No one distro wants to ship buggy crashy software. But at times they do. And it is really just the luck of the draw as to when this might happen to you based on what software you use, how you configure your system and what hardware you have. Some combinations just don’t work for some weird reason and you wont know until you hit it. This is why you hear some people claim one distro is a buggy mess while some other one is rock solid while someone else argues the exact opposite. All main stream distros are just as good as any other in terms of this and you are just unlucky if you ever do run into that type of issue. The biggest problems in this regard tends to be when a new major version of something comes out - but like with gaming it can be beneficial to wait a few months for any issues to be patched before jumping to the latest big distro version.

The other side of stability is API stability - or the lack of things changing over time as new versions of stuff get released. There are two main types of distros in this regard, point release distros which freeze major versions of packages between their major releases so you wont get any new features during the release cycle that version of the distro. Then you have to deal with all the breaking changes from newer versions of software once every so often when a new distro version comes out. Vs rolling release distros that upgrade major versions constantly and so generally follow a lot closer to the latest versions of things than point release distros. Really the big trade off here is not if you encounter breaking changes.

Any distro will need to deal with them at some point, the choice is how often you deal with them. You can wait years on the same version of a point release distro and only need to deal with all the breaking changes once every few years, or once every 6 months. Or you can deal with things as they come out with a rolling release distro. But while it might sound nice to only deal with it every few years it also means you need to deal with all the changes at once. Which can be much more disruptive when you do decide to. Quite often I find the slower upgrading distros are better off with just a full reinstall on the latest version than upgrading from one to the next. Personally I prefer dealing with small things frequently as they tend to be easier to fix and less disruptive over longer periods of time. When I was running kubuntu I used to end up reinstalling it ever 6 months as the upgrades never worked for me (though this was a long time ago), but my oldest arch install lasted probably probably 5-10 years or so.

And at the same time how frequently you get the latest versions of things means you get any performance optimizations and support for newer hardware or newer games as well. But also any bugs or regressions. It is a double edged sword. Which is why stability and performance tend to be a leaver you can tune between rather than two separate things to can achieve. Just like overclocking, the more performance you can get out of a system tends to result in the system becoming less stable overall. Everyone wants the most stable and fastest system, but in reality everyone has a different limit on how much or what types of stability they are willing to give up on to achieve different levels of performance.

But out the box, you will find most distros to be very much within a couple of % of each other and which is fastest will vary depending on which games you want to play and what hardware you have. But they all tend to have quite a bit of head room to optimizes for specific use cases as they all are optimizing for the general use case which is typically just trading off performance in one thing for another. But again, we are talking about tiny difference overall.

It’s rare that a software compatibility is distribution specific but just in case for games you can verify with ProtonDB and for the rest WineHQ AppDB. That’s assuming there is no native support which in this case according to a quick DuckDuckGo search returns https://linuxvox.com/blog/unreal-engine-linux/ indicating that it seems fine.

So… I’d suggest you pick whatever distribution you heard most about, if you are unsure I’d advise on Debian (Stable) but honestly I don’t think it matters much. There might be slight difference in hardware support and performances but assuming you use mainstream hardware it hopefully should have minimal impact.

Regardless of what you choose, document the process and as long as you learn while doing it, you’re going forward!

If you are in rush… maybe postpone the transition to after that project or do it with a 2nd computer.

I want to recommend pop OS but it would be wise to switch to it after there is 24.04 (or later release)

In my personal experience pop os has been absolute rock solid especially with flatpaks However latest stable is quite old (they are working on new desktop environment before upgrade).