I’m not sure what your point is. I wouldn’t recommend a testing repository/branch to a new user, neither from Debian or Fedora. Fedora isn’t rolling per se, it has stable libraries during the six month period and then you could do an upgrade to next version by doing a distro upgrade (the previous version is still supported after that for six months). That said, Fedora is perhaps better suited for software developers and other people that need latest software versions and libraries or perhaps want to run new hardware.
Please folks lets not let this thread descend into a “my Linux distro is better than yours” thread without any specific relevance to KiCad or I can guarantee that this thread will be closed.
And to add a small mass to the other side . . . I’m on Windows 10 and very, very glad to be here.
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If you are going back and forth between Altium and KiCad, I’d recommend using Windows. Windows is probably the most popular OS that people run KiCad on, it’s well-supported, and you won’t have to switch environments when you are going back and forth between the two tools.
If you want to use something other than Windows, I would recommend only using Ubuntu, Fedora, or Debian. Any other distribution is not officially supported by the KiCad team, and so you may run into more bugs than average. Typically these bugs tend to have to do with the user interface or graphics problems.
Note that even distributions that are based on Ubuntu are not officially supported. For example, Linux Mint introduces problems that aren’t found in upstream Ubuntu.
I’m not trying to diss Mint, or Arch, or whatever else people want to use. But if your primary thought about choosing Linux is “I want the best KiCad experience”, go with one of the ones we actually support.
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Thanks for replies
I would imagine that fonts, text sizes, text sizing is the bugbear.
I currently run my XIlinx bohemoth tools inside a Ubuntu VM as a guest on a windows host.
I also heavily use WXwidgets GUI in python and CPP inside both windows and Linux, so that will be familiar. Mostly I use Debian (I have many VMs) but the Xilinx tools are Ubuntu or Redhat suggested.
anyway, time to load up 8.0rc1…
And yes I am after "BEST KICAD EXPERIENCE ", so I will use whatever is required.
I use Slackware (current), no problems with compiling or using KiCad 7.10.
Some effort must be done while compiling dependences, but we do it only once.
Ready to use scripts for that are available.
I use Win (7 before, 10 now) and my Kicad experience is butter-smooth OS-wise.
I expect Linux experience to be similar quality.
As long as you stay away from Mac, your experience will be OK.
My personal experience shows that Windows handles a lot of file structures really badly. All those file openings and antivirus software really slow down my work.
It is the first time opening that crawls. After that reopening is quick from cache. On Windows, KiCad really needs 16 GB of RAM to make sure that caching works
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