topic pretty much has it …
If I am going to seriously evaluate Kicad to replace or supplement Altium, what platform should I be choosing ???
If linux- Which distribution ? (am at home with Debian, that’s about the only preface, but I can run whatever in a VM or as a host) .
Currently I have a bunch of tools that run in a VM on Linux (including the huge sprawly Xilinx FPGA toolchain plus CodeLite ) and alot of other tools run in windows (Altium, numerous IDEs, chip programmers, all eval hardware dev kits)
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Hi, I would recommend windoze only to my worst enemies 
so I am not really objective !
But what I experience is that KiCad runs faster on my cheap i3 at home (LINUX Mint) than on the high performance i5 computer (win10) at work.
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I don’t think OS matters for KiCAD. Also which Linux distribution you use is a personal preference. In a company it could also be a policy thing. Some distributions are better for desktop and some for server use. To a certain degree also how and when the software is packaged for the distribution. E.g. Debian in general tends to be slow to release new software. Personally I’ve been using Fedora on all of my private desktop computers for many years.
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I’ve experienced the same with some other software.
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Another Mint user here.
Although not officially supported, Mint uses the Ubuntu PPA and everything “just works”.
Easy to install. Updates appear in the update manager and require click and a password when you decide to update.
I also use Linux Mint (20.3 I think) and I find it a very user friendly distribution. I run updates around once a month and that is the only maintenance I do. I tried to use Debian directly some years ago but maintenance is a lot more involved. with Mint it “just works” (for me).
Mint is not officially supported, the official supported versions are listed on:
https://www.kicad.org/download/linux/ Other linux distributions may have ports too, but after starting to use Mint I never looked further.
I’ve run Fedora (previously RedHat Linux) as a main distribution since a long time (I think since about 1998 or so when I got fed up with the installation woes and frequent crashes of Win98). For a while I also used SuSE Linux on my laptop, but that was probably more than 15 years ago.
Anyway, at the present I run KiCad on Fedora 39 with Plasma desktop (KDE), and install nightlies from the Copr builds. The stable and stable testing versions also exist in Copr, and the stable versions also come quite quickly into the regular Fedora repositories.
In general KiCad runs well on Fedora, and I have not had any particular problems with it.
Measurements that I have made show that Windows handles directory and many file structures like a pretty library very badly. All those file opens and the antivirus software really slow things down.
Running KiCad on a Windows PC with a magnetic hard drive that has fragmented directories can be glacial.
It’s not even AV. Filter drivers are pretty efficient and near instant on Windows.
The slow down with file access on Windows has to do with File Caching - Win32 apps | Microsoft Learn
Linux doesn’t implement such a system. On the upside, once Windows has cached all those libraries for your “windows usage session”, you can restart kicad all you want and the next library loads will be near instant.
Thanks everyone for the responses, seems Ubuntu or MINT is my target
cheers
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My guess would have been you’d just keep it with Debian, it’s also on the list of supported distributions I linked to earlier.
yeah true, and of course they’re both Debian derivatives. I found alot of aspects of Ubuntu particularly annoying. trying to be more like windows and microsoft in behaviour. IE leave it to me to decide if the OS and apps needs updating ! I always install ALL of the GUI options at install time.
I have tried Mint – seemed stable and clean. A bit too windows-looking for my taste but seems like a good distro. I use pop-os (ubuntu-based) and love it. Standard ubuntu looks dated to me and pop has a more modern look. Personal pref stuff.
There was some oddity with kicad linux where some text stings in dialogs were clipped a bit on top or bottom or something like that. I recall that I added an Otis theme to pop which helped tidy some things like that up. Can’t check right now as my linux machine is on the other side of the house and I am sicker than a dog today, sitting in my chair with a win laptop 
Of course, you can only get dark mode on linux if that is important to you.
Ubuntu has diverged so much from Debian that it’s best to regard it as the head of its own family.
I use Ubuntu (Mate) 22.04 on several machines, a very smooth experience.
Some colleagues use Win, and in my opinion the feeling is not as pleasant as with Linux;
i’ve seen strange behaviors with mouse pointers and in general stuff is more complicated and arcane under Win, but consider we have intensive integration with SVN and Git and DBlibs (MySQL/Maria DB) stuff, under Ubuntu it just ‘flows’ much smoother…
P.S. maybe i’m a bit ‘polarized’ since one of my main drivers for stepping into KiCad (and FreCad) was getting rid of the latest Windows VirtualMachine still haunting my Linux PCs… 
Huh? Linux caches file accesses aggressively. Run “top” on any Linux system and look at the “buff/cache” numbers in the header. This is largely filesystem buffering and caching:
Tasks: 410 total, 1 running, 409 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 0.9 us, 0.7 sy, 0.0 ni, 98.3 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
MiB Mem : 7290.0 total, 290.3 free, 4115.9 used, 2883.9 buff/cache
MiB Swap: 8192.0 total, 6990.6 free, 1201.4 used. 2723.0 avail Mem
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On my windows systems I have swap disabled but lots of RAM… Although if the system runs out of RAM then it is a very hard stop to whatever I am doing…
I cant see there should be any difference in perofrmance between Windows and Linux unless there is something really awkward in the abstraction, architecture translation and rendering of GUI related stuff, which could well be the case in either OS… File related stuff and AV and firewalls , well you can turn them all off (at least in my private environment, I am not corporate) . Sometimes disc queues can be an issue, though the caching should hide that, but on windows I found substantial speed ups in my altium library file and 10 min autosaves if I spread everything across multiple drives… and SSDs can be a big bottleneck if the drive spends time havign to erase sectors and blocks before writing. I use magnetic spinning disk drives for my VMs.
Sorry, that statement about Debian is simply not true! Debian stable usually only get newer versions for a few source packages (browsers e.g)! Once a new stable release was made there will no newer software will get into that release! A new release is been done approx every two years. But there is the option to use the backports archive, there users might! get also newer versions.
I’ll try to keep the backports archive in sync with testing/unstable with a delay of max. 14 days. But this is not always possible due time constrains.
I know, and I didn’t mean it like it was something bad. I’ve been using and still use Debian on servers. Debian is a stable and nice distribution, but for desktop use I prefer Fedora that tend to have latest versions of most software and libraries, kernel etc. and there is a new release every six month. So compared to that, Debian is relatively slow. But that’s a good thing on a server! On the other hand, Debian tend to be really fast with security updates and I’ve occasionally observed that there have been a fix available for the latest trendy CVE a couple of days on Debian before Fedora.
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Debian testing is the right archive to compare then! It’s not helpful to mix up rolling and stable distro releases so newcomers are getting confused.