I need recommendations for a stable release distro for OBS Studio livestreaming and light video editing. This machine will be shared between several users who are techies, although not necessarily Linux (they’re coming from Windows). I don’t want to worry about things breaking because of an update, or to start a shoot only to find problems once we’re live.

Nvidia and nonfree codecs should be treated as first-class citizens. H.264 w/ AAC will be everywhere with this workflow.

Some thoughts:

Linux Mint Debian Edition: Currently my top choice. It just works?

Fedora Bazzite: My second choice, maybe with auto-update disabled. Seems a bit risky though in the case of security updates to packages.

OpenSUSE: I run Slowroll on my laptop and work desktop, however recent package management errors relating to codecs and the packman repo have spooked me away.

Debian: Release cadance seems too slow for my preference.

  • Fliegenpilzgünni@slrpnk.netEnglish
    7·
    8 minutes ago

    I recommend you Aurora. It is basically Bazzite, which you already suggested, but without gaming stuff.

    Why do I recommend you that?

    • The auto updates are amazing. Don’t disable them. It isn’t like on Windows, where it just randomly says “Updating, please don’t shut down your PC” midst working. They get just staged, so they are only applied passively on the next boot. You don’t notice them.
    • Rollbacks: If an update introduced breaking bugs or whatever, you can just keep holding the space bar while booting, and you can select the image from yesterday. Everything is left how it was yesterday. You probably never have to use that feature anyway, the system is super reliable.
    • The release schedule. This one is the most important aspect for your case. uBlue (Bazzite, Aurora, Bluefin, etc.) started offering different variants/ tags if the same image. There’s now a GTS variant around, which uses the last big release of Fedora, which is still kept up to date maintenance wise. So, you are always half a year behind in terms of new features, but it has been tested for half a year more than regular Fedora or the other images. When you choose the more conservative GTS variant, you’ll get way fewer surprises.

    After installation, you can hop into the terminal and use the ujust rebase-helper, where you can select which image variant you want to have

    • latest: synchronous with Fedora
    • stable (default): features are two weeks behind
    • gts: already said, last release, but still secure and more polished.

    I think it is the perfect balance for you between “Debian is too stale” and “Fedora and many other distros change too often”.