My laptop is running out of storage space and I don’t have anything I can remove anymore to increase it by much, so I’m thinking about building a pc. I’d also like to find a better gpu for doing video editing.
It will be the first one I’ve built, so I don’t really know what I need. Also, does it matter for compatibility for Linux whether I go with AMD or Intel?
The high end of what I want to use it for is video editing with Kdenlive or Davinci Resolve, some modeling and animation in Blender, and some light gaming, like Minecraft or TUNIC.
I figure one of these guides might be useful, but I don’t really know which.
Is there anything else I should know for setting up a PC to run Linux?
Edit: Maybe these guides from Logical Increments can help actually.
you are getting advice that will make a good gaming pc but not a good workstation for what you said you’re gonna do.
do the opposite of what most everyone in this thread is saying:
intel over amd (this could actually go either way depending on the price point), nvidia over amd, start at 32gb of ram and go up from there. prioritize cores over threads, sneak a rotational hard disk in, spend more on your power supply than you planned to.
plan on not using wayland.
This is such a weird comment. Why would you want Nvidia on Linux? It is a pain and more expensive. Also Wayland works well on AMD and I hear it works well on Nvidia now
I’ve heard from many commenters in this thread that Blender and Davinci Resolve play nicer with Nvidia than with AMD when it comes to Linux.
Strong disagree on that one, X11 sucks
I am not going to fight you on if x is better than Wayland.
The ops use case involves operations, software and hardware that function best with x.
The op should avoid Wayland.
I mean there is no harm in trying Wayland and switching to X11 if it doesn’t work.
The op asked for help to make their experience as painless as possible and listed two primary use cases that not only are often related to the problems people encounter with Wayland but function best with hardware that is also related to the problems people encounter with Wayland.
If someone said they need to haul hay I wouldn’t say “try it in your Saturn first and see if it works!” I’d say “make sure you have a truck or a trailer.”
The harm is in setting a person up for failure when they asked for help.
Wayland is way less painful now as it fixes the architectural issues with X. It is simply cleaner and way less complex. It also has the benefit of being reasonably secure and maintained
Newer hardware is likely going to be wayland focused in the graphics stack. Not to say X won’t work but as time goes on it is getting more and more broken
Why should I plan on not using wayland? Is it because of the Nvidia support? I use Fedora normally so I’d have to install x11 after installation as Fedora recently dropped x11 support.
You mainly want to be able to do 3d and video editing right?
Those two, specifically with davinci resolve and blender, work best with nvenc and libcuda(?), the software libraries that let you take advantage of your nvidia cards encoders and cuda cores.
So if you were building for that workload, you’d have an nvidia card and many problems people encounter in Wayland come from using it with an nvidia card.
So yeah it’s the nvidia support. Most people will say “fuck nvidia, just don’t buy their hardware” but it’s the best choice for you and would be a huge help, so choosing between Wayland and nvidia is a no brainer.
It is a bummer that you’ll need to install x specially, but I’d be really surprised if there isn’t decent support for that.
There’s always the hope that Wayland will get better over time and you’ll be able to use it in a few years.
E: a word on encoding: both amd and intel CPU’s have video encode and decode support, but the intel qsv is more widely supported and tends to be faster most of the time. When people suggest intels arc gpus they’re saying it because those gpus use qsv and for a video editing workstation they’d be a good choice.
Part of the reason I put intel and amd cpus on an even footing for you is because any cost savings you get from going amd would likely be offset by the performance decrease. Theres some good breakdowns of cpu encoder performance out there if you want to really dive in, it remember that you’re also in a good place to buy intel because of the crazy deals from sky is falling people.
That kinda ties into the cores over threads thing too. If your computers workload is a bunch of little stuff then you can really make hay of using a scheduler that is always switching stuff around. One of the things that makes amds 3d processors so good at that stuff is that they have a very big cache so they’re able to extend the benefit of multi threading schedulers up to larger processes. You’re looking at sending your computer a big ol’ chunk of work though, so you’re not usually gonna be multithreading with that powerful scheduler and instead just letting cores crunch away.
Part of the reason I didn’t suggest intels arc stuff is that you’re also doing 3d work and being able to take advantage of the very mature cuda toolchain is more important.
Plus nvidia encoding is also great and if you were to pair it with an intel cpu you could have the best of both worlds.
You’re really looking to build something different than most people and that’s why my advice was so against the grain. Hope you end up with a badass workstation.