I used to do all my game dev on my windows PC, but it has completely broken. I am stuck with a mac mini m1, which is fine for game development, but I feel like I am consistently wrestling with its metal API for other areas of game dev I do, I don’t like the idea of dual booting into ashani linux for it either.
I have a budget of around £100 or so to get a single board computer, I was looking at for example pi 500 or raspberry pi 5 with 16GB of RAM but I find conflicting information of how well Godot 4.3 would run on these machines, where the game development I do is usually low poly 3D type of games, I dunno if it could handle it. Additional to which can anyone suggest any similar type of single board / refurbished mini PC or similar to that within my budget that could run Godot well for 3D game dev? I feel like its possible kind of.
UPDATE: I went with AMD Athlon 3000g build for now.
I am on an ARM computer at the min, specifically mac m1, I hate it, I am constantly wrestling with it’s API’s for other game dev work I do outside Godot, whether it be C++ or the Graphics API or both lol. I wanted to move away from ARM a bit even if it meant I went pure low spec, and this chip only costs between £12 to £50 and its 64 bit, downside its dual core but I have worked with worse. Just to avoid confusion here for anyone else reading, the chip / APU is definitely 64 bit, but of course it also supports 32 Bit I believe (x86 and x64) confirmed here AMD Athlon 3000G - YD3000C6M2OFH / YD3000C6FHBOX
My next challenge in that respect, I think I am going to go with Linux over Windows, now trying to work out the best distro to suit such a APU whilst still being able to run godot as basically as possible.
I will make a new post on that probably / look for existing info though.
Something arch or arch-based may work best, it’s got Godot stable in the official repository, and SteamOS is based on arch so there’s some compatibility there if you look to release on the steam deck.
EndeavourOS is making the rounds on distrowatch.com, probably has a nice installer and good desktop defaults. I’m having a good time on base Arch, I am familiar with linux and it was easy enough to set up through the archinstall command that comes with the minimalistic installer image.
Yeah I was just looking at https://www.endlessos.org/ also to see if they released any sort of OS as I was talking to someone at godotcon in 2024, about OS programming and such. I mean ideally I would create my own OS but its a very time consuming project lol. Then I was thinking of making my own linux distro, but I hear arch is very customisable and the association with SteamOS is a good call. Thanks for the advice saves me making another post, will mark as solution.
endless is very cool! They even make the block code plugin for Godot. However the operating system is designed for young education, it’s not minimal or customizable.
On building your own, there is “Linux From Scratch” or Gentoo, requiring you to compile all of the software instead of downloading. On a dual-core I do not see this being a good experience though.
I am thinking now maybe of upgrading the APU to a quad core as these are more the recommended rather than minimum specs for godot and blender and it’s only about £10 more in cost. But yeah I mentioned that OS because I wonder if when they made it they optimised it better for running more optimised for godot somehow or something.