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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?
@bluejaunte
To be honest I don't recall seeing WINE in the live version, nevermind my install. I suppose I could have accidentally switched it off during the configuration excitement, but if that's the case then it was probably for the best anyway, since Installing Daz Studio using Lutris appears to have automatically dealt with any WINE requirement.
Anyway, you're about to see that I've taken your advice about reminding myself that I'm now on the bleeding edge of Arch Linux tech!
@FizzleMyth
You're welcome, and what you said makes me feel even more certain that we need a custom OS such as shown here, something that meets those basic requirements. I've not finished it yet, but the one I'm about to show is basically what I think we all need as creatives. Sure, everyone has different needs, but as long as GIMP and Inkscape work for 2D, Blender and Daz Studio work for 3D, and Davinci Resolve/Studio work for video, then we are all sorted in so far as we at least have a fully functioning creative suite that is Windows and MacOS free, and all using software that is completely free!
@TImberWolf
A huge thanks to you for the step-by-step, it really is massively appreciated and I'm pleased to say all went well. Since then, I've set about making things even more minimal, more clean, and am really pleased with the results. Yes, this is GNOME, and it looks and behaves exactly as I want it to. Everything from the bar at the top to the Menu button, to the menu itself is customised using the GNOME customisation tools, and an amazing GNOME extension called ArcMenu. For those who don't know, you can design any type of menu you like with ArcMenu. There's so many options you could spend hours, days, or even weeks playing around with the options available.
Since power is on the right side of the bar, there's no need for it to appear in the menu as well, so I removed it from the menu. I removed a whole bunch of functionality from the menu in order to make it look and behave the way it does, and I love it! And what's really cool about this design, is that if you want more in-depth software to show, you simply click the menu button using the right mouse instead of the left mouse. All images posted here show the menu with a normal left click, and of course, I added the Arch logo to remind myself that I'm at the bleeding edge or Arch Linux tech (as per bluejaunte's jest).
@Everyone
All images are 1920x1080 with an aspect ratio of 16:9, so as long as you view each image full size on a screen of the same resolution and aspect ratio, you will get a very good feel for how beautifully minimalistic, clean and optimised it all is.
IMAGE 1
Shows the desktop with the menu open. Haven't installed DaVinci Resolve Studio yet and that''s the only reason you don't see it in the menu.
IMAGE 2
Shows what looks like a simple folder, but this is actually a minimalised Lutris that holds Daz Studio and Daz Install Manager.
IMAGE 3
Click on Daz Studio from there and, look at that, it's Daz Studio running like it was natively on Linux!
IMAGE 4
LibreWolf, best browser ever (supported by Arch themselves), based on Firefox, configured for privacy and security and has uBlock Origin configured by default.
What more do you need as a minimum? To me this is the perfect system and environment, or at least it will be by the time I've finshed installing and customising stuff. I've taken the time to make that menu as minimal as possible, renaming the CachyOS stuff a little so that hopefully any beginners will look at it and realise, wow, even I could handle that, seems pretty self explanitory when it's organised like that.
So in a nushell, this is Arch Linux-based CachyOS, with GNOME set as the GUI during installation, GRUB as the bootloader, ArcMenu set as the GNOME menu, Lutris installed and configured as per TimberWolf, and the rest is just my own personal taste, how I think it should look. The icing on the cake of course is that I can relax now. I'll never have to tolerate another forced update or any of the other BS being shoved down people's throats! It's good to finally have a fully functional OS that serves me and not a corporation. And I can tell you that the performance of this thing is truly jaw-dropping at times. Blender, for example, boots up in around a quarter of a second, and did so even the first time I ran it after installing it using what you see in my menu as "CachyOS - Software Installer".
Think you can handle a system like this? Of course you can, and if I can then surely anyone can. But anyway, I'm about to move home shortly so will have to put further customisation aside until that's over and done with. But once I get it finished I might make a live video to show you just how good it is.
And is it perfect?
Not at the moment. But only because TimberWolf is absolutely right about dForce not working. That's a real bummer. But on the plus side, I do believe there are drivers for AMD that have the features he talks about. So who knows, once I get the move over and done with, I'll start looking into that and will have to have another go at picking TimberWolf's brain! Daz Studio does otherwise run perfectly, though, so it's very important to remember that, and as you can see in IMAGE 3 , it even detects Iray and works perfectly despite I'm on AMD.
If you're on Nvidia, I believe dForce will work by default.
Also, regards the LibreWolf browser, the reason it looks so minimal is because it's customised again. Basically I have the bookmarks bar hidden, removed some stuff from the tool bar, rearranged some buttons. and resized the main input bar by inserting extra separators. This makes the input bar shorter, and personally, I just think it feels much better that way.
Also, you'll notice my home page is completely blank. This is what I see every time I run the browser or whenever I click the Home button. The icing on the cake is that I also have it set so that it auto-erases everything by simply closing the browser. This means that no one can datamine you session to session. I never need to clear my browser, it's done fully and completely automatically each and every time I close the browser, all ready for the next time.
Again, done the way it should be done!
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.
Regards web browsers, to be fair, they each have their pluses and minuses, but from personal experience, LibreWolf is (for me anyway) the only web browser that has actually done what it promised, and does so without nagging me to update (at all).
Unfortunately I can't comment on the GPU thing, cause I'm not rendering on any GPU, not even my AMD. If I cannot get dForce to work on my AMD card, then I'll just have to buy an Nvida card and have done with it. But at the moment, with the prices or RAM and storage through the roof, I'm no longer going to even entertain the idea of buying a new card, unless and until that situation comes to an end.
Not sure if I disabled something during the install, but for some reason, I'm not able to see anything on, or drag anything onto, the desktop.
There is a folder named "Desktop", and if I save anything to the desktop then it does automatically go to the desktop folder. But I can't actually see the content of my Desktop folder on the desktop; there's no icons visible at all, even though I have screenshots saved to the Desktop folder. I suspect I've either switched something off during installation, or perhaps I need to specifically install a GNOME extention in order to activate that facility.
Does anyone know which GNOME extension (if any) I would need to install in order to activate that?
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
Cheers, although the conversation at the second link was started 15 years ago when GNOME was at version 3, but I'm running version 49.5 - lol
It did help though. because hidden among the thread is a notice of multiple changes since then. Apparently you need to install a GNOME extension called GTK4 Desktop Icons, so I searched for it using the built-in Extensions Manager. It found the extension, I clicked on Install, and in around five seconds flat it had downloaded it, installed it and even activated it wthout a reboot! Literally, just like that, the icons appeared on the desktop!
I wasn't aware of the intentional design difference. I just knew I'd seen icons on GNOME, in fact I can't remember ever seeing a GNOME-based distro without them!
I'm all excited again now, very much so. Because this Desktop Icon extention for the GNOME Desktop is sort of like the ArcMenu extension for the GNOME Menu. It's got its very own multi-tab settings panel where you can set up customisations that Windows and Mac users could only dream about. Something immediately striking about it is that it uses a pre-measured grid system (best way I can describe it) so that when you arrange your icons, drag them around etc, it guarantees that as you fill it up, it will always fit an exact amount of rows and columns of icons across and down your screen so that they never get cut-off at the edge of the screen. It appears to be taking the size of the icons, the screen resolution, working out the measurement on the fly, and dividing it evenly.
It's bloody nice, very elegant, honestly the best I've seen. And when you select multiple icons and drag them, it superimposes the normally inviisible grid so that you can better visualise where you want to drop them. It even follows the selection pattern of the icons you selected. If you were to multi-select a bunch of icons in the shape of an "S" for example, then that superimposed grid will take on the form of that "S" as well as aiding you in dropping it to a new screen location. You can even adjust the way all of that stuff works, it's an absolutely beautiful system where the moment you see and use it you think, wow, nice!
Anyway, something I had to try immediately was making a direct Daz Studio icon for the desktop so that I could bypass the Lutris window completely. Even that worked. I'm puzzled how to edit the Desktop icon for that shortcut, though. There will definitely be a way to customise the icon, but at the moment it has me scratching my head.
But yeah, wow, it really is just like clicking a desktop icon in Windows and the program running as if it were a native application. I never even see the Lutris window now, and would only ever need to use it in order to add more Windows programs if I wanted to. Haven't added a screenshot this time, but will do once I figure out how to edit the icon of a shortcut.
Muahaha, done it! The Daz Studio and Daz Install Manager icons need to be set within Lutris' preferences since they're held within Lutris.
Once you assign them a custom Icon, it gets used by the GNOME desktop too!
WIll post some screenshots tomorrow, but for now I'm grabbing a bite of supper!
I just installed some more extensions, this time one for adding taskbar functionality to the GNOME bar, and another for adding a customisable button to it.
They both work as expected and again offer a dedicated control panel for customising each extension. The attached image shows the GNOME Extension Manager listing the extensions I've installed so far. But most important in regards to my quesiton is that you will see that each of them has a settings icon. Clicking any of those settings icons will bring up the settings panel for the extension it relates to. But the things is, not all of those extensions install a direct icon to click on in order to access its settings panel. The extension called "Icon Launcher" for example, the only way I can access its settings is via the screen you see here, the GNOME extensions manager.
I've noticed that if I right-click on the desktop icons for the others, that I can select "Properties" and it will give the internal Linux name for the settings window. I can then use that internal name to create a menu entry so that I can access it directly from a custom menu. But how do I find the internal name of, for example in this case, the window that appears when I click on the settings button for "Icon Launcher"?
In general I know how to do what I'm suggesting, but I don't understand how to find the internal name of a specific window that is currently open, and I need that in order to create direct custom menu access to each of those little settings buttons' windows.