Reply To: Blender and Linux

[greg5552]

Eduardo,

I have way more experience with all three platforms than I’d like to admit (I was using my first Mac before Adobe products were ported to Windows), and naturally all three have their strengths and weaknesses. I’m currently using Manjaro Linux (a slightly less labor-intensive version of Arch) on my personal laptop, and it runs Blender very well, for a laptop. One of the strengths of Linux is your ability to custom tailor your workstation to your needs, and there are many different flavors of Linux distributions available that can address your personal situation. Just by default, does Linux perform better than Windows? Not necessarily. Linux can be very light on system resources, if you design it to work that way.

Linux isn’t actually an operating system. What it is, and what makes all Linux flavors alike, is the kernel, or the main core packages that run the system. What makes the various distributions different (in part) are the package managers used for installing and keeping the system up to date. The GUI itself is a package which includes a window manager, and there are several available that can be used to custom tailor your system to your needs. A lightweight window manager will go a long way toward reducing the drain on system RAM and offer some nice performance increases. I’m currently using XFCE and it’s very quick, attractive and easily customized.

I’ve used lots of different distros before settling on the current one. I’ve gone back to Debian several times as well because there are choices for stability versus cutting edge updates, it’s very mature, and I like apt, the package manager. Though a lot of people like Ubuntu because it’s one of the most new-user-friendly distros, I’m not wild about it. I have it running my media center and I’m not a Unity fan (the user interface). It lags at times, which I’ve never experienced with another Linux. I’m also not a fan of RPM-based distros like Fedora, Red Hat (though it’s long been commercial), or CentOs. Mint is popular, though I can’t say much about it personally because I’ve only tried it a short time. Were I you, I’d look at a stable release of Debian with a lightweight WM. If people suggest Ubuntu, it’s based on Debian, and works in much the same way, just many parts are packaged together for an easier new user experience.