TLDR.

The shape of creatives on linux isnt bad, but its not great either...and its hard to justify when you can use any tool on the other two platforms just fine without a second thought, and i fear gaming is being focused too much on vs the overall useage as PCs are much more for gaming...

This post, mainly fueled by the recent announcement of the Steam Machine and people clamoring for it and its OS.

and to be clear, its a good device, i have no qualms with it.

But I do feel there are giant holes that "it's just for gaming" really gloss over deeper issues that will hamper adoption, OVERALL, big time. This pertains to "the desktop is just for gaming," and I've been fighting this for years, and there's no one I know who hasn't dipped out of gaming, at some point, to do other things.

Some background, I am currently a film student, I am getting a degree in 3D Animation. I have done a LOT of 3d work before starting this degree, but starting college has only widened my software palette

i still game a lot, i would gauge i spend roughly 50/50 in software and gaming. In fact, it is not uncommon for me to have a game open whilst I create, especially if I am using it for reference, or in the case of Blockbench, I will have Minecraft open to check what it's doing in-game.

What i have done is i have compiled ever bit of software ive had to use in and out of school, then highlighted what is currently in my software stack, and then what OS it uses.

For the most part, i have a MOSTLY adobe free suite. With only the Substance Suite being my main app. (and for transparency, these are bought on steam as perpetual)

But even taking Adobe out of this chart, entirely.... and swapping it out for say, 3Dcoat, is still just under half of the software on the list with 9/19 natively supporting linux (with Substance Suite removed)

On top of this, only half of the Linux-supported applications explicitly say they support a common distro like Ubuntu or Mint, with Houdini outright listing a ton.

The problem with this, is all it takes is a cranky support person to not help you, because you're not on the right distro.

There are also other considerations. I have carefully built my software over the years to require Nvidia as little as possible...I currently run an all-Radeon workstation. However, this has its limits and has boxed me in more than a few times.

Maya has Linux support listed. Arnold, its renderer, does not support Radeon. Cuda only.

i eat rendering on it with my TR

Agisoft Metashape was the only photogrammetry program I found that didn't solely rely on CUDA for depth maps, instead using OpenCL and Vulkan.

From what I understand, NVIDIA support on Linux is still very poor.

And yes, I fully understand wine and bottles, etc, exist, but that's not the point of this post.

This whole list, has full Mac and Windows support, minus a single app (and max to be fair is derlict as all hell and idk why its still in use so much)

But as someone who lives doing this, i could jump to mac without a second thought (for whatever reason)

But for linux? its still not an option.

sure. i could fight and i'm positive i could get a lot of apps if maybe not all of these to function.

But when you are in the creative groove, the last thing I want to do is have to figure out WHY a piece of software isn't working and by the time it's working, have that iron no longer be hot and I've wasted a night.

Even running Radeon hardware, which is something most people will go pale at when you're running in a creative space...if its on windows, 99% chance i can pick it up, learn it and use it.

probably closer to 95% on mac...

and this doesnt account for things like community addons to already natively supported linux apps that may not work in linux...

i tried ubuntu back in 2020, my workstation then was a 3900x with Dual Vega 56 Cards, i was using Blender with the Luxcore Render engine....

Blender worked fine, but i had to install ubuntu despite i tried starting with mint. (for the proprietary AMD drivers needed for OpenCL rendering...i imagine it is the same for HIP these days)

Cycles in OpenCL mode worked beautifully.

Luxcore crashed the system so hard i got to learn what happens when a graphics shit themselves with no BSOD.... after configuring the drivers and also trying ROCM for its OpenCL extensions....and pretty much getting told by devs of luxcore, "FO" (and already having had a utterly awful time setting up network drivers, and it being days at this point) i went back to windows and currently have no plans of going back..... and i dont see it improving for linux any time soon with people so hard focused on gaming

The Grand hope is, something like the steam machine leads to more people on linux, thus developers, and i hope that is the case. more is good and we need it in the computer space.

However, as someone whose computer has always been more than just for gaming...a box of imagination. I need to be able to use it, full stop and not question it otherwise.

Swapping tools isnt always an option, either. Learning tools is a giant, giant time sink. Different apps that, despite competing in the same space, frequently don't offer the same gamut of tools or possibilities.

Blender for example....It can't touch the poly counts Zbrush hits, not by a LONG shot. and Blender is STILL not as pen friendly as Zbrush

World creator, Vulkan-based and hyper-focused on terrain generation.... it does 1 thing and it does it EXTREMELY well.

Substance painter is still borderline unmatched...3Dcoat is good, but its not the same.

Maya and Blender do the same thing but are built so fundamentally differently, a full switch over can take weeks if not months....

i STILL cannot model in maya....but i have almost 11k hours in blender.

However, the time it takes to shift programs is something that isn't talked about enough, especially if you're on the clock and time is very much money to you.

T