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Comment by horsellama | Hacker News Reader

What’s the best alternative distro for ML work? I mainly need the nvidia stack + PyTorch

I am so biased this borders on shilling, but may I suggest taking a look at openSUSE Leap Micro? https://get.opensuse.org/leapmicro/5.5/

We (SUSE) have extensive testing and quality control, if you are looking for something very stable. Leap is the version built out of the same bits as the enterprise version. The "Micro" part means it is smaller, transactional, and immutable. It's built for containerized and virtualized applications. You can install the nvidia OS bits in the OS, and then build a container with libraries.

I’m using debian sid without issues to communicate, but Ive used linux for 20 years so maybe my definition of issues might be poisoned

I switched to sid from arch because their approach to software major release is dangerous (i.e. adopt plasma 6 the day of release)

My 3090 is plugged into an old intel pc running Debian 11. Tried Debian 12, but couldn't quite get the right version of cuda to work with both tensorflow and pytorch.

Personally I'd just pick whatever Linux distro suits your fancy for other reasons, and then the official PyTorch docker image as a distrobox. The combination of Nvidia drivers, CUDA/CUDNN/etc libraries, and Python libraries is extremely fragile and sensitive to version bumps and stuff so I'd want it in an isolated consistent official box. This I'd what I do on ublue.

Debian will be the closest in terms of functionality and organization.

PopOS.

Comes with the drivers you need, super nice and streamlined UX.

Debian.

arch ?

I managed to get a 4090 hooked up on an Arch machine. It buzzes when the LLM is generating stuff. It isn't a straight forward thing, though, you still have to dig through the deps and get your versions just right. On top of that you need to get your versions from bottom-to-top correct for everything to work. Some versions of Cuda don't play nicely with some versions of the Python modules, so take care if you go this route.

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