which linux version best for houdini

Despite its complexity, Houdini is super tolerant towards the Linux-distro used.
In fact, it may be more sensible to pick the distro based on the other programs that need to run on your workstation (since they may be a lot more temperamental).

I have worked with Houdini on Centos, Suse, Ubuntu (including forks like Mint) and Arch.
All of them were perfectly fine.

I use mint because of its stability and never had any issues.