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Hi. I am looking to toy around with this project. I am trying to pick a distro to go with at the moment. I am familiar with Fedora/RHEL because I work with a lot of CentOS servers. I have toyed around with Ubnutu in the past as well.

Simply put does one distroy have much better support/performance than the others? I am looking to try and configure my GTX 980 x2 SLI which is another factor I need to consider.

Thanks.

Not really. They all have access to the same libraries. On average, though, the Ubuntu flavours (Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu) and Mint give the best performance, depending on which libraries and drivers you have installed.

For simplicity, just go with Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit. Install the proprietary Nvidia drivers, the newest Ubuntu Mainline Kernel (http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.19-vivid/), and the Oibaf PPA. That will probably give you the best performance with the least headache, and if you need help, there are plenty of forums and documentation and tutorials to help out. 

Consult the Ubuntu forums and documentation for help with setting that up. That is just my opinion, but I think that would be the absolute simplest way to get the libraries you need to get the best performance.

If you are REALLY interested in seeing benchmarks, then of course, you would want to spend some time at http://www.phoronix.com/. Phoronix is awesome, and he made his own test suite for benchmarking Systems. There are TONS of benchmarks there. You will see that Ubuntu will usually give the best performance. I do not recommend getting another version besides 14.04, though, as you can add the libraries that you want in there, instead of going with 14.10 or 15.04, which are not LTS versions, and non-LTS versions can break easier (without getting too technical).

Hope this helps. Also, don't forget to read the wiki after you get your system set up.

Edité par RoninDusette

The difference between main distros is probably insignificant.

If you really mean to have the best possible performance, I suggest using one light desktop environment (XFCE, LXDE,...) and then not install or remove all the services you don't use.

I will personally vouch for XFCE. I LOVE that one for a lightweght DE. There is also Enlightenment, which I have grown to love a LOT over the last 1.5 years.