Need help choosing my linux.

M

MrKicker

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I need help finding out what linux.

I'm cuurently running windows7 on a laptop, I'm gonna build my own pc but I dont want to spend the extra $100 for another copy of windows. I've secretly allways wanted to switch to linux, but I dident have a good reason to untill now.

I'm a heavy gamer.
Looking into game dev for a future carear.

Heres the pc I've put together on pcpartpicker.com
http://pcpartpicker.com/user/MrKicker/saved/22C1
I'm also looking for advice for my pc that I'm gonna build above.
My budget is $700 just so you know.
 


I would go with something that has KDE. kubuntu would be a good start. Or try the original flavor ubuntu. kubuntu.org
 
If you want to use the PC you are going to build for games and game development then Microsoft Windows is probably the way to go. There are an increasing number of games on Linux, but still more, heavy games on Windows. Have a look at the list on: http://icculus.org/lgfaq/gamelist.php

The Linux distro with the most games pre-installed, although that is of little benefit because games can be easily added to most distros, is probably at: http://ultimateedition.info/ultimate-edition/ultimate-edition-gamers/

If people want to advise you about particular distros e.g. use Arch or use X or Y ask
1) Have they got real, actual experience of a 6 core processor or are they just fanboys
2) Why, for what reason, are they recommending a particular distro. Can they tell you?
 
Your right, I probably should stick with wondows. However, hopefully by the time its time for me to build my next computer, the majority of games would work on linux.
 
I agree that unfortunately Windows is still the de facto gaming OS mainly due to the fact that driver support is almost exclusively geared for Windows.

That being said, playing games and developing games are two completely different beasts. Depending on what you want to do it would definitely be beneficial to learn to program and learn command-line navigation and scripting. For this, in my opinion, I find Linux a lot better/more fun. You have much more direct access to the kernel, which controls the functionality of your hardware (this is true no matter the OS), you have direct, easy access to source code to get familiar with and compilers to start coding yourself, and in general just have more access and ability to see how your computer actually functions. Proprietary OSes (Windows especially) try to remove the user from that as much as possible.

Game development is a very demanding field because a lot of people go into it with a love of games only to realize its the same as any software development job. Long hours staring at thousands of lines of code with a debugger trying to find a faulty numerical truncation bug or a way to optimize a particular function call. Even game testers have very tough, demanding jobs: http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/03/29/the-tough-life-of-a-games-tester so essentially, make sure you love coding and even if you aren't directly developing games, you'll at least be doing what you love (there is always a demand for good programmers)

Most PC games are written in C++ with Java and C being close follow-ups. As Linux development is based in C and C++ its a good place to start learning those languages. The only development that would be easier learned on Windows would be the graphics APIs for DirectX and OpenGL, which can be freely downloaded via Microsoft if you want to check them out.

If you're looking to get your feet wet with Linux the best way is to keep Windows and use VM software like VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/ to run Linux on your Windows OS.
 

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