If you don't care about the story of how I discovered the Linux desktop skip the italic text.
Having used Linux only at home for the past 5 or 6 years I believe I have been able to learn a lot of what makes a great vfx artist's Linux workstation. This post is intended to shed some light for all those of you who would like to make the jump but are unsure of what Linux has to offer. This will be even bigger of a jump for those of you who don't use Linux at work. In visual effects only a very small amount of major VFX studios do not use Linux for artists' primary workstations. But it's also worth noting that if you do use Linux at work, changes are you're using some RedHat, Fedora or Centos derivative, and, it's most likely quite an old version (thanks to Autodesk for only supporting outdated Distro versions). Weta digital was the only studio I've worked in that was ballsy enough to offer a recent distro and version and Desktop Environment. Those systems guy over there really know their stuff and have, like, no fear.
1) - What makes a good Linux distro for a small studio or home studio?
You may wonder what a 'linux distro' is. It's short for distribution. Linux is free and opensource as we all know by now. It means that any one of us could right now download the latest linux kernel install a bunch of other software on top of it, modify it, ad custom bits and pieces to suit it to your purpose and boom, you can release your very own OS tomorrow! Seriously. And there are no real rules to how modified it has to be to even qualify as a different distro. All it needs is a new name. This is why there are so many Linux distros out there. It's one of the most daunting aspects for newcomers to Linux. Which distro to chose and why? It's really shitty investing a lot of time and energy getting one distro up and running only to find out that you really need another one to run the software you want.
So the points to look out for when choosing a distro are:
- User friendly installer and auto configuration of hardware.
- MASSIVE software repositories (repos) (that's essentially Linux's 'appstores' which by the way have been around for much longer than apple's money churning application manager).
- Support for proprietary software in repos. Especially hardware drivers like Nvidia and the likes.
- Easy access and setup of alternative Desktop environment.
- Largest possible community. Numbers don't lie...much. If most people are using a distro it means it's more likely to attract software developers to focus on that distro as their main target platform. Also a huge community means lots of help available and lots of bug reports to help the makers fix problems.
In almost all of these categories I've found that Ubuntu and its derivatives are clear winners. The only annoyance about using a Debian based distro is that the default 'installer' format is '*.deb' instead of an '*.rpm' like in the redhat-like distros. If you don't really get what that means, don't worry. There is a solution for this anyway and it will be covered as part of the install guides for any software package that only comes in rpm form. The shear amount of development work, support and the huge community using Ubuntu these days makes it the perfect distro for the new user, artistic user or anyone who doesn't actually have a particular reason not to use it. If you're starting from a clean slate I would recommend Ubuntu as your distro. (we'll actually go with a dirivative of Ubuntu in this article called Kubuntu. More on that below).
I started with Mandrake back in 2006 then quickly moved on to Fedora. I used Fedora for about a year. But at the time there simply wasn't much in the way of powerful graphic software in the open-source world. I managed to install Maya and Softimage (XSI at the time), I think I had a Prman compliant renderer going (Aqsis? or Pixie, can't remember), of course blender and Wings3D.
Needless to say that compared to what was available at the time on Windows it wasn't really comparable. Zrush was getting really good then and Mudbox had been announced, Modo was probably at its prime and, of course, Photoshop was available. Video editing on Linux was a nightmare, thanks to the proprietary codec industry being totally counter-productive pricks and demanding licenses and payments that just didn't fit in the Open development model. I have to admit that at the time I was a fairly productive artist, with personal projects always going on at home. Then Linux happened. Needless to say that for a while, pure creativity had to take a backseat until I could start having enough tools to be creative again.
2) - Which Desktop Environment should I use?
I mentioned support for multiple Desktop environments above. For those of you who are confused by this, let me first explain what a desktop environment is. It's basically the graphic 'shell' around the Linux core (kernel). Linux is basically just a command line OS like DOS (albeit much much more powerful). On top of that you have a windowing system called X. Which is essentially the engine that runs the primitive windowing system. And then on top of that again is your Desktop Environment (DE) which is the equivalent of the windows gui, essentially explorer and the start bar along with the desktop mechanism and the gui to adjust preferences. You can 'talk' to the Linux kernel and X via any desktop environment you want and provided the tools are written well you wouldn't get any conflicts alternating between 2 DEs. The most prominent DE for Linux are GNOME, KDE and XFCE... There are LOADS of them out there most of the other ones are usually reserved for the geekier types than us artists though. Although I have to say I have been curious about the tiling window managers such as XMONAD lately. But for the intents and purposes of this guide we'll go with the DE that will make an ex-Windows user feel the most at home. KDE.
3) - Does my choice in Desktop Environment affect my choice of distro?
Yes and no. In our case, using Ubuntu as an example we have two choices to get Ubuntu with KDE installed on our machine. Ubuntu used to come with GNOME2 by default, lately it's moved over to GNOME3 with something called 'Unity' on top. That is basically an attempt by Canonical (makers of Ubuntu), to create a very user friendly gui based on a solid and proven DE. Unity is cool, but it's really turning out to be a tablet, netbook type GUI and it's lacking a lot of the multitasking and file management tools one needs when working in visual effects. Think of it like using a Mac for file management. There will come a point where you will download a third party file manager or just plainly shoot yourself. It's simple but as soon as you start needing to copy loads of files here and there and really juggle files around like you would with something like midnight commander it becomes really painful.
KDE is PERFECT for visual effects. It has enough in common with Windows to allow people to pick it up intuitively whilst still having many more features than windows itself for general file management.
KDE3.5 was great and most VFX studios today are still using it. With the advent of KDE4 there was a mixed bag of reactions coming from the community. I was one of the people not welcoming the change thinking that they were moving from a lean, mean, desktop machine to a desktop env for morons who like to see pretty desktop effects at the expense of valuable resources. I have to say it took me a while to understand the true power behind KDE4 but now I would never go back. It's in fact much lighter on resources, the desktop effects can be tweaked so that it simply shifts the computing from the cpu to the gpu (a la mac OS X) and it's so much prettier. :)
If you look at a screenshot of KDE it may look familiar to you if you've ever used Maya2011+, Nuke, Houdini, Mari or many other packages. That's because they all use something called QT to draw their interface. QT is essentially the baby of KDE. KDE basically uses QT to draw most of it's widgets and tools and buttons. Since QT is becoming so accepted and standard these days thanks to its ability to be fully cross-platform and it's massive bag of features, it means that we're really not taking a huge risk going with KDE as our main desktop env.
So we know this now. We want to use Ubuntu and KDE. What's the simplest path there? Easy Kubuntu. It is also possible to install normal Ubuntu and then install a package called 'kubuntu-desktop', but it's really not worth the effort since Kubuntu is professionally supported and never seems to miss any Ubuntu release. It's a great distro. I've tried many, Kubuntu, imho has the best of many worlds in the Linux universe of distros.
...to be continued...
