Go with whatever your distro provides as a default. RVM completely segregates your RVM Rubies from your system Ruby, so you're far better off with a "common" system Ruby install than you are trying to hack together a stripped down Ruby install. The package maintainers already know the platform specific idiosyncrasies you'll need to work around, so might as well leverage that. You may also encounter other software that expects a certain system Ruby environment on your system, so there's that too.