On 30.04.25 05:09, Ken via Discuss wrote:

Not an easy question to answer, as there are always chances for
strange and special issues.

Without knowing your previous experience with Linux, my advice
would be:

In general, find and select a well maintained distribution you
feel at home overall (e.g. people you know use it and can help).
Or just go for one of the big players where it's easier to find
articles/videos/reports.

From official OpenSCAD builds there's a slight preference leaning
toward Debian/Ubuntu but we really try to provide options for as
many people as possible and most distros do the same on their own
too.

ciao,
Torsten.

I've used Ubuntu, desktop and server side, for many years now, last 3
years with openscad, first as an appimage and then switched to a build
from sourcecode also the openscad-python variant.

Works like a charm :)

Greetings Matthieu

Torsten Paul via Discuss schreef op 2025-04-30 12:17:

I don't think there is a distro difference for openscad. Maybe you will
want to use those fancy kernel builds, e.g. xanmod, for slightly better
performance. You may want to look at Phoronix for performance comparison.

But to be honest, this should not influence your distro choice. Choose
your distro based on your needs, e.g. rolling release vs more stable,
package support, whether you are willing to tinker with the settings, etc.

IMPORTANT: Don't take the openscad benchmark result in Phoronix into
account, it is the older stable version where performance
characteristics is very different from the manifold backend.

On 4/30/25 18:17, Torsten Paul via Discuss wrote:

Thank you Gentlemen- based on your replies, I think I will go with ubuntu as I have a small familiarity with it,  and there is a lot of on-line help available for neophytes like myself. Unfortunately, almost no help locally, pretty much everyone I know is firmly wedded to windows or mac- but hey, I'm only 76, plenty of time & brain cells left to learn aother o/s🙂

On 2025-04-30 20:34, Chun Kit LAM via Discuss wrote:

--
Cheers, Ken
bats059@gmail.com
https://vk7krj.com
https://vk7krj.com/running.html

A baby can be defined as an ego with a noise at one end and a smell at the other.
Your job as parents is to teach them to control all three.
My job as a grandad is to tell you how you are doing it all wrong!

My advice would be simplify the answer: There is no distribution
that's markedly better. Choose a distribution based on your needs. For
a "starter" with Linux, that would be a well-rounded distribution like
Ubuntu.

It comes with openscad available as an installable package... not the
most recent but usually: usable.

Roger.

On Wed, Apr 30, 2025 at 06:34:48PM +0800, Chun Kit LAM via Discuss wrote:

--
** R.E.Wolff@BitWizard.nl ** https://www.BitWizard.nl/ ** +31-15-2049110 **
** Verl. Spiegelmakerstraat 37 2645 LZ  Delfgauw, The Netherlands.
** KVK: 27239233    **
f equals m times a. When your f is steady, and your m is going down
your a** is going up.  -- Chris Hadfield about flying up the space shuttle.
**  'a' for accelleration.

fussy-free. But, as others have said, nearly any distro will work.

I agree with Rogier.  Most distros are based on a couple of primary paths
(like Debian, Slackware, etc.), and they are subtly different but mostly
the same.  That said, there might be some reason to choose one over another
like support -- my current laptop was purchased from System-76, and runs
Linux native (Pop!_OS, an Ubuntu derivative).  Before that I mostly ran
Gentoo for the previous 20 years, and before that I really liked SUSE
(great for its initial science support), and started with RH.  If you want
to look around, take a look at DistroWatch <
https://distrowatch.com/search-mobile.php> - which will let you compare
various ones against your expertise level, use of systemd, supported
languages, and more.

While I love Gentoo, that is probably the only one I would suggest NOT
trying unless you are comfortable doing lots of low level systems
administration - Gentoo originated as a build-from-source distro, and once
you wrap your head around writing ebuilds (which explicitly define the
package/version requirements), you can explicitly control the entire
dependency graph.  That is a godsend when developing and maintaining code.
The OS that came with my System-76 laptop is at the end of its LTS this
week, and I am seriously looking at upgrading not only Pop!_OS, but
installing Gentoo for dual boot.  Not for the faint of heart, but it
typically works for me.

EBo --

On Wed, Apr 30, 2025 at 1:57 PM Father Horton via Discuss <
discuss@lists.openscad.org> wrote:

No, but I run an MSYS2 build sometimes.