multimedia/art distros for 3d graphics/vfx (artistx, studio64, dyne:bolic)

Hello linux gurus,

I've been hunting for a distro to install on a new laptop I will be receiving soon (Clevo P151HM1) and was wondering if anyone has any experience using some of the multimedia distros out there and could recommend one. artistx, ubuntu studio, and dyne:bolic caught my eye, but there are a few more out there. distrowatch pulls up a bunch, but I've heard good things about the above 3.

I will be working mainly with 3d graphics software (sidefx houdini), along with photo/texture editing & HDRI processing, and some video editing, so audio/rtk stuff isn't that important. Rendering will be heavily CPU dependent, so if there's a way to disable all the bells and whistles and streamline the OS that would be a plus.

The only thing that is particularly unattractive about artistx is that it doesn't offer a 64bit option, which is unfortunate. That alone may rule it out as I will be running some memory intensive particle & fluid/dynamics simulations.

Any help/input is greatly appreciated, thanks!

 

My vote would go to Ubuntu Studio x64.

 

I tried Ubuntu Studio (both i386 and amd64) about two years ago but found that the preemptive kernel was running pretty unstable.
Apart from that I found the package pre-selection pretty good for multimedia work, but for me that's no reason to chose a specific distro because I always build my system from a minimal installation.

I also tried dyne:bolic some years ago. It was ok but I didn't like the GUI (ymmv).
From the distrowatch multimedia list I tried Musix and StartCom too. While I found the GUI of Musix to be a bit lagging and the German localization pretty poor (I'm fine with no localizations but I don't like poor ones), I can't even remember if I found something special about StartCom.

bottom line:
I'd suggest not to look for a special multimedia distro. Just chose your favourite one and tune it the way you need it.