I’d like to give linux a try on an older WinXP laptop.
Now there are quite a few flavours of linux out there (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mint,…). Has anyone made good/bad experience with one or the other? Which one works best with blender and gimp?
Is there a url which gives me an overview about all the different kinds of linux?
Thanks for any help.
I’ve been very pleased with Mint (Cinnamon desktop).
Was a bit of a pain getting GPU set up / driver installed properly (still a newbie). Also you need to first install an older version of Blender through software manager in order to get dependecies sorted out - you can then install latest from blender.org website.
Cheers
It’s been a while since I’ve used it, but I used Blender successfully with Ubuntu for several years. I loved it. Actually, coincidentally I’m going to go back to Linux sometime very soon. Let us know which you choose and how it works for you!
Thanks for your replies.
I think I’m going to try out mint cinnamon…
Thanks
Hi, I use OpenSUSE for many years now, tried many distributions but ever go back to it.
There are two downloads, live system and install system.
You can install from live system too but install DVD include all software packages.
You need some time to get familar with Linux, don´t give up after a few days.
I use dual boot system for some time but as I start Windows for update only it was time to clean up my system to a single boot system. 
Cheers, mib
Blender should run equally well on all Linux distros. The question is which one do you like? I used to run Fedora and liked it a lot but it’s pretty much on the bleeding edge and so I had problems with library compatibility. Now I too am running Linux Mint 17.1 with Cinnamon and it’s working very well. I also run Ubuntu at work with Cinnamon and it works well too, but not as nice as Mint. The underlying system is pretty much the same for all distros, the big difference you will notice is the desktop. I really like Cinnamon, others like Gnome Shell, and there is a ton of others out there (KDE, Unity, XFCE, etc.).
i like suse
BUT!!!
and this is a kicker
it NEEDS a lot of ram 4 gig
a old XP laptop welll
without knowing if it is a 17 year old thing that had win98 and updated to xp
a p2 or p3 cpu and 64 to 128 meg ram
or a 2003 laptop with a centrino and 512 to 1 gig ram
or
if the ram was upgrade to 2 to 4 gig
???
you might have MAJOR promlems even installing “Damn Small Linux”
( needs 64 meg ram and 8 gig drive min.)
or
mint17 using XFCE might have no issues
bit DO NOT expect any major current linux OS to be able to run Gnome3 or KDE4 on it
a lightweight desktop manager like
lxde
xfce
will be needed
PLEASE post the hardware specs
i like many others have been “Microsoft” FREE / CLEAN for 10years
a "NO Microsoft " 10 key tag :o