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@3DIO
I'm still not sure why you are so concerned about essentially running a barebones version of Linux with the bare minimum installed. It's not Windows with its performance-destroying bloat and any programs, drivers, sub-systems you don't need or want can be sequentially removed once you've got to grips with the distro. The removal process is 'smart' - only dependencies that are unique to the particular application you remove will be deleted, leaving other applications with shared dependencies fully operational. Until, in turn, you remove them. Honestly, give up this idea of creating your own minimal installation (essentially your own fork of a Linux distro) as, and I hope I'm not being unkind here, you don't really have the knowledge yet to be doing this and it's not necessary - certainly not from a performance perspective. You are painting yourself into a corner and manufacturing artificial difficulties.
I do understand the thought process of making something ultra-efficient and I actually admire it but perhaps you are starting this project from the wrong angle.
Get a distro you like up and running. Forget the bloat. It's there, it doesn't really impact anything except disk space and even then it's minimal. Get Daz Studio installed on it and any other applications you need. Get OpenCL working. Backup your finished setup so you can come back to square one if you make a mistake later. Then, and only then, should you think about stripping out everything you don't need or want. I really do think you are starting your project from the wrong end.
Bazzite is an Atomic Fedora distro - it's immutable. You cannot make any changes to the core system files. No tinkering, no changing, nothing. It's a great choice for someone who just wants Linux to work reliably as updates are generally yearly and the kernel is optimised for 3D/games. However, if you want to do something like install a system-wide WINE that isn't part of the supplied package (or anything else really), you'll need to layer them using rpm-ostree which is a topic in its own right and if you want any of your packages to be updated regularly, forget it. You swap flexibility for reliability with Atomic distros.
CachyOS is what I call the acceptable face of Arch :) It's the distro I use at home. It's very, very flexible and very fast but be aware that Arch-derived distros don't come as discrete releases every year or six months. They get rolling updates and will, on occasion, happily destroy your entire OS. It's been a while since that's happened and Cachy is probably the best Arch distro for newer users, but be aware that you're entering into a very self-sufficient world if you go down that path. It's essentially the polar opposite of Bazzite: You swap reliability for flexibility and very fast updates.
I would also file Gnome in the dusty archives of yesteryear. It works, there's nothing wrong with it per se but it might hold you back. You want good performance in Windows apps under Linux? KDE/Wayland.
This is a very good explanation of what Wayland is without being overly technical:
https://kevinboone.me/wayland_ground_up.html
Gnome uses the Wayland protocol and, inevitably, every desktop eventually will. Do bear in mind that what I write is my opinion - it isn't established fact or law - and there are as many opinions on any particular aspect of Linux as there are distros. Pick a distro you like working with and get everything you want up and running in it. If you start from the other end and build it from the ground up to avoid a problem that doesn't really exist you will be very much on your own if you run into a snag; you will undoubtedly be missing components and infrastructure that other folks will assume you have. Get it working out-of-the-box, join a forum or two and take it from there.
You said you liked Mint - it's a great choice. The Cinnamon desktop is not the snappiest when it comes to Studio in WINE but it works fine. Again, this was my experience with my hardware under my testing conditions. You may find none of the lag that I encountered but you won't find out unless you get something actually installed rather than diving into the weeds from the outset and dismissing everything because they happen to come with some applications pre-installed. I recommend the KDE desktop for Daz Studio users because, again in my testing and my experience, it worked flawlessly. So did Fedora/Cosmic, but Arch/Cosmic was appalling so there's no hard and fast rules here! There are other considerations that may apply: Studio is not the only application you will need and this may influence your choice in another direction - perfectly valid.
GUI just does terminal commands in the background. Doing it in the terminal is simple enough though.
Update all packages: sudo pacman -Syu
Remove package: sudo pacman -R <package_name>
Google pacman commands, it's not rocket science.Do it a few times and it becomes second nature.
I've very seldom had to use the terminal
Cool, grats. CachyOS is pretty neat. Though your no-Wine comment confuses me. I thought that was partly the point of CachyOS that it comes with these game optimizations like Proton which would of course include Wine? Did you disable it during the install or something?
Keep in mind you're essentially now on Arch. That means you have to tell everyone every chance you get: I'm on Arch btw. But joking aside, you're now on the bleeding edge of things. Just keep that in mind when you update, some things may break at least in theory. Good idea to get some kind of daily backup system in place that you could fall back to if the worst case happens.
Your whole report sounds most excellent. Thank-you for sharing your experience. I hope you’ll update once you’ve got Daz and Resolve going, as those are two of the apps I would want running if I setup a new box.
So, are you saying that using Arch is the equivalent of being a vegan for Linux users? XD
Haha, it's just a meme.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/btw-i-use-arch
I even said it wrong, too
(also I don't even know if Arch based distro qualifies or it has to be Arch proper).
Right then. Daz Studio on CachyOS with GNOME and AMD hardware. *Shakes head miserably*
First off, the good news: The DAZ UI under GNOME works perfectly. It's fast, responsive and, as far as I could tell with my 10 minutes of messing around with it, bug and glitch free. You also don't need to install a system-wide WINE because you don't need a CUDA installation. The GE-Proton runner which comes with Lutris works perfectly so there's no need to complicate things at this point. Let's go:
1) Open your console. Firstly, update the system. Always update the system before you install any application. It's important on all Linux systems but it's critical with Arch distros.
sudo pacman -Syu
Install Lutris - this is a manager for Wine applications and sandboxes them.
sudo pacman -S lutris
Select the first repo, extra-v3. You will often be presented with multiple repos to choose from when installing packages. If offered, always select the extra- or cachy- repos in preference to others which are probably not as up to date. If in doubt, do a search for the info.
2) Download the latest version of DIM from Daz.
3) Run Lutris. WAIT for it to update itself and download some packages. It's very easy to miss this but there are progress bars in the left-hand column. If you just pile in, nothing will work and you'll be starting again from scratch.
At the the top left-hand corner of Lutris you will see a + symbol. Click it to begin adding an application. Select 'Install Windows game from executable' and follow the process through. You'll be prompted for a name - DIM is the obvious choice - and at the final screen you'll be prompted for the location of the executable. Simply find the DIM package you downloaded earlier and select that. Let DIM install and run but at the end, uncheck 'launch now', and close DIM.
I hit a snag with this under GNOME and this didn't happen with KDE and Wine11. Just to check it wasn't a one off I installed it all again and had the same problem: If Lutris seems to hang at this point with nothing happening, don't click the abort button on the Lutris window. Instead, open up the sytem monitor and force stop the Daz DIM executable. This will allow Lutris to finish the process cleanly.
You should now have a blank grey panel in the main Lutris workspace called DIM. Double click it to launch and log in.
4) With DIM running, I suggest you don't install all the recommended items that pop up. I assume you have a drive with your Daz content already installed on it so all you need to do is close down that window and install Studio 4.24.0.4 and the CMS. Studio 6.x will not work without additional steps so don't try to install it at this point. Once you're all done, close down DIM.
5) Back in Lutris, right click the DIM icon and duplicate it. Call it Studio or whatever you like. Right click again, select 'configure' and in the Game Options tab change the executable by navigating to the dazstudio.exe executable which is where you would find it in a standard Windows installation - drive_c / Program Files / DAZ 3D / DazStudio4
That's it. One working Daz Studio setup. You will have to symlink your content directories as Daz Studio will be unable to see outside of its little Windows sandbox without this. I can't tell you how exactly how to do this as you haven't provided any information at all about your setup but symlinking your folders from inside the Wine prefix is what you need to do. Plenty of info available out there on how to do it. Once that's done you can add them in the usual way inside Studio. You'll need to update DIM if you use it for installing items you buy from the store to point to the correct locations as well.
It's a bit more complicated if you want to add Nvidia GPU support (but not massively so) and these steps would be required anyway. You don't, so you're done!
Additional Notes:
If your content drives use NTFS, Linux will be able to read them. However, if you try writing to them from a sytsem using btrfs or ext4 then eventually something will go horribly wrong. You'll need to change over the drive(s) by whichever means is the least inconvenient. There are utilities which purport to convert drives on the fly but the safest way would be to copy your data somewhere else and reformat into btrfs or whichever file system you picked during installation.
I suspect you won't want a desktop shortcut but, if you do, the option exists in Lutris on the right-click menu for each application. Renaming or adding fancy icons involves opening the shortcut with a text editor and making the appropriate changes.
So you mean if I install Fedora or Ubuntu and install DAZ 3D on it, but keep my old external USB SSD drives in NTFS Ishould convert those drives BTRFS or my choice ZFS, otherwise Linux will screw the exterrnal NTFS drives up eventually when I run DIM to download new or updated purchases and installl them?
If you can absolutely 100% guarantee that you will never mount those drives using Windows ever again, you'll probably be fine leaving them as NTFS. Probably. Bear in mind that file permissions don't transfer from Windows to Linux (and vice versa) so any read-only protection you've put on your content will be lost when mounting under any Linux distro. Encryption or compression is obviously not compatible. If you will not write to them from Linux, leaving them as NTFS will be fine as well, but this is not what you intend to do.
Linux will quite happily write file names with characters that Windows can't use and it can corrupt the index, even under normal use. The snag comes if you then try to open it up in Windows - watch the drive errors mount up... You will end up with folders and files you can't read or delete when using Windows.
The NTFS compatibility package that most Linux distros provide by default (ntfs-3g & fuse) is woefully slow at both reading and writing, especially so on clockwork drives. However, Windows cannot read btrfs or ext4, ZFS and many others (there are drivers for Windows but my experience of trying them did not end well!) which puts dual-boot users in a bit of a bind. I've got a dual-boot system with NTFS drives and I only write to those from Windows. Linux is read-only but that's self-enforced and I've messed it up a few times. exFAT would be a good compromise as long as you don't have any executables on your drives which you intend to run under Linux and, at some point, that's what I'll get round to doing. It's a pain to do with Terabytes of content though.
My experience of writing to NTFS drives using Linux has always ended up in some kind of recovery scenario requiring Windows. Do your own searches as there's plenty of conflicting advice but I would not recommend writing to NTFS drives if at any point they may be used by Windows.
Here's the real kicker though. If you are ditching Windows completely and have NTFS drives on your system, if something does happen to them you will need Windows to fix the issues. A power cut during a write operation, bad sectors, whatever you can think of. If they are Linux file systems then, well, you don't.
I had no issues so far using the same NTFS drive for both Steam on PC and Steam on CachyOS. However I will probably install everything on Windows and just play on Linux for comparison or a little tinkering. If you're dual booting anyway and do it this way you might be fine?
If you're using one drive that hosts executables for both Linux and Windows then you really don't have a choice - it has to be NTFS. I don't think any Linux distro will reliably run executable files on FAT32 or exFAT. Files written by games and applications tend to have conventional file names or are written to somewhere in the WINE prefix when being run in Linux/Steam so the chances of anything going wrong is slim. Having had to sort these problems out, though, slim <> impossible.
As long as you have access to Windows to correct any errors that may crop up, NTFS drives are... acceptable. @3DIO is ditching Windows entirely so if anything goes wrong with the Daz content drives, which are almost certainly NTFS, there will be problems which is why I recommended them being reformatted if possible. I find the performance difference between WIndows and Linux using NTFS drives very noticeable but, like all things, it depends on your own hardware and how you're using it. Some questions in Linux inevitably devolve into a form of 'What's the best length of string?' :)
If you go all-in on Linux and write to an NTFS drive regularly using DIM or manual installation my own experience is that it is only a matter of time before something goes wrong. I stick to Windows to write to the drives, except when I forget and cause problems. Your mileage may, of course, vary.
This will all pale into insignificance when 3DIO attempts to get an OpenCL driver installed, on Arch, with an AMD GPU that has a somewhat dated architecture using a mix of AMD's own pretty abysmal ROCm stack and open-source drivers. I managed it on a different distro with a modern AMD GPU but I suspect very little of that process will be relevant. There are the three of us that use CachyOS but none of us have ever tried to do that. Honestly, I'm not sure it's possible but I hope it is because I have never seen someone so excited to get a Linux distro up and running and be delighted with it at the end of the process. Most people are back with Windows within a week!
I would like to ditch Windows 11 completely but not at that risk. When, & if SSDs every become cheap enough again for me to keep both a LINUX DAZ DIM/Content Libry SSDs and Windows versions of those same SSDs I would definiately try out some of these DIM plus FS combinations to see what goes wrong & why.
Thanks for the comprehensive explanation.
Maybe I will try Winboat as well. Any experience?
Looks great. Haven't read too many positive things about LibreWolf though, I'll stick with Brave.
Isn't clearing history (sites, cache, cookies, etc) an option on all browsers now?
Brave can do all the things you mention - open new tab as blank is my default with customised tool bar, though I have bookmarks bar set to show 'on new tab only' as I use it a fair bit at the minute (can hide completely if you like).
Back on topic - I still need to find time to try getting the GPU to render. I can work on scenes in Linux, but for now I still need to boot to Win10 to render if it's a complex scene.
Hmm according to this
https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/1bsnmib/why_no_desktop_icons_in_gnome/
That is on purpose? Surely something can be hacked though.
https://superuser.com/questions/265916/why-does-gnome-3-not-display-files-on-the-desktop
Though you probably googled all this already. Beyond that no idea. Gnome says you don't need desktop items, so maybe you don't
This would've probably been the way to go to secure against update breakage:
Btrfs file system & Snapper for automatic snapshots. Sadly I went with ext4 at the time. I just do regular images in Windows using Macrium Reflect which seems to have no problem working with Linux partitions as well.
The main snag with using Btrfs for Daz Studio content files - in particular the /runtime and /data directories as well as some scripts - is that it is case sensitive. As far as I am aware there is no option in Btrfs to make it case insensitive. This will cause issues because any drive using Btrfs will treat 'DAZ 3D' and 'Daz 3D' as separate directories for example. Because Daz have never enforced a naming convention for files and content (and for third-party content they couldn't anyway) there is a complete mish-mash of naming and structure used throughout the Store content. They may well have such a convention but any casual glance through your purchased products will show that it's a free-for-all from the top-level .duf files, all the way through to the /data and /runtime files. It's a bit of a mess.
Windows basically sweeps all of this under the carpet because although NTFS *is* case-sensitive, Windows uses it as case-insensitive. It isn't an issue if you use Studio on a supported OS would be a very fair pushback to the above.
If you have a separate drive or partition for your Daz content, I'd suggest using .ext4 on it. It's faster than Btrfs and has a casefold option which makes it case-insensitive, bypassing all the potential problems. The only snag is that enabling this option essentially reformats the drive/partition so you have to plan in advance. For the actual OS though, Btrfs with snapshots makes life easier in case of upgrade difficulties. Just a note to anyone not familiar with snapshots, they are a way of rolling back your OS to a previous working state but they are *definitely* not backups. These snapshots cannot be separated from the filesystem itself and copied somewhere else because they actually are the filesystem. You'll still need a backup which means copying various directories to an external drive, be it USB or cloud-based.
You can of course leave your Daz content files on an NTFS partition but it's a question of when, not if, something will go awry in my experience.
Good points. Anything I say is always assuming dual booting so content is on NTFS anyway. Btrfs I would've done only for a pure Linux system partition.
@bluejaunte
Absolutely - I think most people will be dual-booting their systems. As long as you have access to Windows it's normally straightforward enough to correct any errors that occur on an NTFS volume. It's usually indexing errors which are easily fixed with chkdsk. The problem is that if you have performed a full exorcism with a stake through the heart and got rid of the Windows OS completely, but left your content drive(s) as NTFS, there are no tools in Linux I am aware of which can do that error correction. Linux distros just will not mount a drive with something like a superblock or indexing error. I suppose you might be able to fix this with a bootable Windows USB but it's all getting quite involved when the simplest option is to make your drive exFAT (if dual booting) or .ext4 if just using Linux.
These are all just suggestions anyway and I'm sure someone with more experience than me could offer up some very good reasons why I'm wrong!
@3DIO
Sadly, that will not help. If you cast your mind (and browser!) back to Csaa's post with the diagram showing where OpenCL fits into the Linux graphics stack, it's not part of the Radeon ROCm stack which sits outside it. You'll need ROCm for rendering in Blender anyway so you'll have to install it regardless. IIRC, what we did was install ROCm and Daz Studio recognised the 9060XT as a valid OpenCL device but the dForce kernels would not compile. We carried on and installed Rusticl but it still didn't work so we wondered if there was a driver conflict. After then uninstalling the ROCm OpenCL driver the kernel compiled successfully. I have no idea if all, some or none of these steps have any significant impact; a fair amount of a cheeky Merlot was consumed during this and, as I mentioned earlier, I have zero experience with AMD hardware. Zero. All I can offer is the order in which we tried things and possibly some of it is redundant or unhelpful.
Anyway, first things first, let's see if the latest ROCm drivers will work with your 580. I'm pretty sure they will so:
sudo pacman -S rocm-opencl-runtime
sudo pacman -S rocm-hip-runtime
lshw
You should see your GPU listed if it's all gone well. At this point, load up Studio and see if your dForce kernels compile. I don't think they will, but that's the first stage. Give it a try and if your card is recognised but unusable we'll carry on.
I am not hopeful I will be able to come up with a solution that works with your hardware unfortunately. The easiest solution, as I think you know, is to grab yourself an Nvidia card. You don't want anything earlier than a GTX 1660 and, realistically, you'll want something with RTX in front of the number. Not cheap, even secondhand, I know, but converting Daz clothing for cloth simulation in Blender can be.... challenging :)
@3DIO
Installing ROCm won't brick your distro (said confidently) but if you have files you really don't want to lose, back them up anyway before you start. This is a pretty good idea whenever you're about do something that has a slightly unknown quantity to it: I asked one of the folks in this thread to test the Nvidia denoiser on their fairly unique Debian-based distro and it utterly mangled their WINE installation which was a little... unexpected... as it had never happened before, but we're doing things that the software was never designed to do. The odd bit of breakage is inevitable. Hopefully your tolerance for these sorts of shenanigans is high, because it will need to be!
I think what you'll find is that Studio will recognise your 580 as a valid OpenCL device but it won't be usable for compiling the kernels - that's what I meant by 'unusable'. What we're hoping to see is your GPU appear in the Advanced tab of the Simulation Settings pane. You might see it displayed instead as some kind of AMD generic computing device (this happened on the 9060) - I can't remember the exact description - but hopefully it will appear in some form or another. If it doesn't, I have nowhere left to go.
Assuming it does, grab something dForce-esque and try to simulate it. If the kernels compile I will be amazed and immediately go out and buy a lottery ticket, but step 1 is getting Daz Studio to acknowledge that you do actually have an OpenCL capable device.
(Edited to add: We got this working on Nobara, btw, which was what you were planning to use previously. The package we installed was rocm-meta which is undoubtedly completely different to the Cachy repo so this is an all-new set of weirdness and difficulties for me as well!)
Funny. I went through the trouble of building nvidia-libs from source and adding that to the Steam Proton runtime and was happy to see that I could indeed now render in Iray. Only to shortly thereafter realize you can simply add
PROTON_NVIDIA_LIBS=1
in the Steam launch options. So if you have an NVidia GPU just add Daz Studio in Steam and add that and you're good to go. Still getting "could not find a valid opencl device" when trying to simulate though.
Well, that and force one of the Proton versions under Compatibility of course. Otherwise it just starts through Wine.
Unable so far to get OpenCL working on NVidia. Did I miss the solution, are we even sure this can work at all?
@3DIO
The final command must be something I've installed then. Try inxi -Fxz
Tell me what it says re. your GPUs but I think you might not have installed the drivers properly. At no point was this ever going to work just on its own, but you do need to get the drivers installed as a first step.
@bluejaunte
dForce works out of the box with nvidia-libs on Nvidia hardware but I've never tried installing Daz Studio via Steam. It's a novel approach and I suspect that's what causing you problems :) You can either get Studio running using bog-standard system WINE (make sure it's v.10 or greater), or via a WINE manager like Lutris. Symlink the CUDA libraries by simply running the installation script as described on the github page and everything will just work: dForce, iRay, and the denoiser.
Oh ok, will try that. I didn't install anything, this is Daz Studio installed on Windows started through Steam/Proton. The idea is to get the speed of Proton that makes gaming possible today. Or am I misunderstanding that completely?
@bluejaunte
I don't know if that approach will work but I think it's going to be problematic. I very much doubt the steam runner includes Optix and OpenCL, but I don't know for certain. I can, however, guarantee it will work if you install Studio via DIM (or the complete packagae executable from your product library) from within your Linux OS. If you follow what I suggested for 3DIO earlier, all you'll need to do additionally is grab the pre-compiled nvidia-libs package from Github, and then execute the install command from the terminal. There are full instructions on the web page itself. Should be child's play for a man of your talents :)
@3DIO
I remain unconvinced it's working (looks like the default Linux AMD driver to me), but there's an easy test. Install Blender, head to the system preferences and see if you can assign your 580. If you can't, you don't have the rocm stack installed.
Daz Studio is not on Steam. You can manually add whatever game or software to it and it will run through the Proton layer. Which I assumed has the most performance benefit (not for Iray of course, just the general viewport performance).
@bluejaunte
I understand what you've done. I just don't understand how you've managed to tie the (essential) nvidia-libs DLLs into that setup properly. Anyway, I didn't find any particular runner gave an advantage in terms of viewport performance. 4.24 on my system is running on system WINE (11.7), and 6.x is running on proton-cachyos-slr. The viewport performance in the Beta is pretty woeful even in Windows and the only reason it's still on that runner is I neglected to change it back to sys-wine.
I can't tell you how to get it working in the configuration you're using I'm afraid. Give it a whirl in Cachy itself - I doubt you'll find the viewport is any different in how it performs on Windows.
@3DIO
I'm showing my lack of expertise as well here. I didn't realise it had to be an RDNA card for rendering which yours is not. The only thing I can suggest is to join a Cachy forum and ask people who will be experienced with AMD hardware how to get the ROCm stack and OpenCL (Rusticl is probably what you'll need) working properly. I doubt any will have experience of Daz Studio but someone on there will be able to point you in the right direction but I have my doubts this will be successful.
Still, all it will cost is time and you'll undoubtedly learn a lot. I am not really the person to speak to for AMD stuff.