Reply To: Blender and Linux
Forum Archive › Blender and Linux › Reply To: Blender and Linux
WARNING: OVERLY LONG POST ALERT
Substance
Substance is supported on Linux but, as I say, the only officially supported distribution is CentOS. If you ask for support for any other distribution, Allegorithmic will basically ignore you.
For some reason, the 3D industry has latched onto CentOS as their Linux distribution of choice (Maya, Modo/Nuke, Renderman all list it as their officially supported distribution). I personally find this bizarre, as CentOS to me (and I think a lot of people) is the distribution you run on racks of servers… not workstations!
That said, you can get Substance Painter running on other distributions. It’s just not supported officially. Other Linux users on the forums are quite helpful. For example, I had a UI resolution issue that someone helped me resolve by explicitly setting a variable used by Qt.
Adobe
Adobe like to pretend Linux doesn’t exist. You can find substitutes for some of their software (Gimp, Inkscape etc.), but actual Adobe products are a no go. Forget running them via Wine. You might get this working after a LOT of effort, but you are one update away from it being broken again. Also, they are very likely to be buggy and generally not reliable.
I use VirtualBox running a copy of Windows 10. I only really use After Effects at the moment (and I only really mess around in it). This is an OK solution if your PC is a decent spec (there is an inevitable performance hit using a virtual machine – obviously).
Gaming
Don’t do a lot myself, but this is getting much better these days, mainly thanks to Steam. Lots of big name titles are now available on Linux (via Steam).
Distro Choice
These days, I tend not to stray very far from the Debian -> Ubuntu -> Linux Mint family. This is mainly because of the widespread compatibility, but also because Mint running Cinnamon desktop is seriously sexy looking UI 🙂 ). With the popularity of Ubuntu, you will find that most vendors offering a Linux version of their software will have a Debian package, and probably support Ubuntu.
I’ve used Fedora and Red Hat while I was in Uni, and I went though a phase of loving Mandrake for some reason?!
Speaking generally, though, I’d definitely recommend something downstream. Until recently I was running pure Debian on my desktop, because I fancied myself as a “serious Linux user”, and it gave me a smug sense of self satisfaction having pure Debian up and running. I came to realise, however, this is stupid. My main interest is 3D graphics, which requires all the proprietary drivers and codecs etc. Getting that to work on Debian is possible, but time consuming. It’s trying to get a square peg into a round hole. Better to take the easy choice of a downstream distribution, and get over yourself :-). Generally speaking, downstream distributions “just work”.
To be honest, PopOS is totally new to me. It’s downstream from Ubuntu (just like Linux Mint), so it’s probably quite good. Grab a LiveCD – try it out! One thing I will say is that it is using a GNOME shell based desktop by default. This is the reason I stopped using Ubuntu. GNOME shell split opinion among Linux users (and hatred for it is the whole reason that Cinnamon was forked off from the original GNOME code). I personally cannot stand GNOME shell as I find it cumbersome, unintuitive and ugly, but that’s an individual thing. Linus Torvalds shares my opinion on that 🙂
I’ve heard good things about Manjaro, but I’ve no experience of it. It’s based on Arch, which is very highly thought of but also PROPER hardcore Linux for people who like to spend most of their lives fiddling with config files. Manjaro, however, is supposed to be user friendly, so again it’s a nice downstream distribution.
Cintiq
Wacom has extremely good support for Linux. I have no experience of the Cintiq, but I expect it will work well out of the box. If it doesn’t, it usually isn’t long before it does. Wacom are very Linux friendly, and actively support their products on Linux (even if they fall short of releasing an official driver in their own name). Maybe post on the Wacom forums to make sure, but my feeling is you will probably be OK with this.
Using a downstream distribution like Linux Mint or PopOS usually means an older kernel (they stick with stable kernel releases for as long as they can to ensure stability). I had to update my kernel on Linux Mint to properly support my Wacom tablet as it was a little old. It was not a hard process. I imagine it’s not going to be hugely difficult in PopOS either.
Hope that helps