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(Removed). The OP's edit to their original request for assistance renders my reply pointless.
Hi all, I was wanting to get back into installing DAZ on a Linux system (cachy would be nice), but I haven't been in the trenches for some and have lost track of what works why and how. I tried to find my way around this thread but keep sliding down too specific rabbit holes. Is there a place someone can point me to that has the basic Dos and Don'ts and maybe some guiding for installation? That would be so cool.
With 2K comments this dicussion could better be located into "3rd party software" together with Max Maya etc. as it is evident there's a strong community interest.
@tsroemi
The most important thing is to pick an OS that you are comfortable using. It is very easy to try out any number of Linux distros before you settle on one but actually giving advice on how to install the OS is a little trickier due to the variable nature of peoples' hardware and setup. Most modern mainstream distros have a very easy to follow step-by-step process. Many will offer Nvidia drivers as part of the setup procedure which is one less thing to worry about.
If you are new to Linux I would suggest you use an OS that is widely adopted and has an active community rather than something niche and odd. Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora to name but a few. CachyOS is the easiest of the Arch-based distros to work with, but it's still Arch. It really doesn't matter which one you pick as both Daz Studio 4.x and 6.x can be installed on basically all of them. The only distros I would consider avoiding would be the immutable Cosmic series of operating systems, such as Bazzite, which can prove problematic. They are great for people who just want Linux to work and basically be indestructable. However, they are not so good if you need to start tampering with some of the core system files which you will have to do, unless you want to go down a dark, dark, very dark rabbit hole of technical hooliganism.
I highly recommend you use a separate drive if you plan to keep your Windows OS but at the very least you should install Linux on a separate partition. Don't try to install it over the top of Windows!
Have a think about what you plan to do with your Daz content. Linux file systems are case sensitive which will cause problems with some of your items: 'DAZ 3D' and 'Daz 3D' are two different directories as far as Linux is concerned, the same for 'textures' and 'Textures'. Linux OS support for NTFS drives is somewhat limited but it does render the above issue moot. However, in my experience, using Linux to write to NTFS drives for any period of time ends up with them needing to be fixed using CHKDSK or similar from within Windows.
So... if you plan to keep Windows, consider reformatting your content drives/partitions to something like exFAT which is usable by both Windows and Linux without issues. This could be quite inconvenient but it's less inconvenient than constantly repairing your drives. Or, keep your drives as NTFS but only write to them using Windows.
If you plan to ditch Windows completely, consider using ext4 for your data drives/partitions. An ext4 partition can be set to case insensitive so it behaves like a Windows drive, but this can only be done during the formatting process so you can't add this option retrospectively to drives with existing content.
Installing Daz Studio is possibly the easiest part. There are many ways to do this: One person here has installed it through Steam with a fairly clever hack to enable dForce, some people have used system WINE and some have used Bottles and Lutris (both WINE managers). Personally, I recommend Lutris due to the ease of setting things up and then making changes later if you need to. It's by far the simplest option, but the choice is obviously yours. Have a look back through this thread to see a how-to for each of them.
Finally, for reasons no-one yet really understands, Debian-based distros lose the ability to run the built-in Nvidia denoiser. If you absolutely must have this available, simply avoid Debian distros. One member here using a niche Debian OS, Tuxedo, brute forced it with symbolic links which briefly enabled dForce and then it promptly destroyed his entire Daz WINE setup. Hard to recommend this route :)
Have a think about what you want to do and if you have any problems or questions, let us know.
@Padone
Completely agree. I have no idea who to ask though.
@TimberWolf I suppose any moderator here can consider the request, or at least let us know if it is possible. To move this into "3rd Party Software".
@TimberWolf, thank you so much for your post. I'm not completely new to Linux fortunately, I've had Mint on my writing laptop for quite some time and am happy with it, if a little bored. I got Cachy on a magazine DVD coincidently and tried it out on a 2017 iMac that I keep wanting to use for CG work since it has this beautiful display, but keep running into problems everywhere - and the system was SO fast and pretty, it just amazed me, even starting from DVD. Then I read that many arch distros play nice with nVidia, and this got me started to look further into things.
I've decided on Manjaro instead of Cachy now because I don't think I can be dealing with such a rapid update system, especially with a fickle DAZ environment installed. Manjaro installed quite nicely except for the wifi which I saw on the Cachy site is a known problem, and I managed to fix it. Sound is still missing, but low on my priority list for now. Everything else just works. Well almost everything ...
The one thing that proves really hard is, of course, the egpu with the nVidia inside. I've gotten the system so far as to recognize and authorize the enclosure, it also seems to see the card as well as the driver - but it somehow can't connect the two yet. Looking further into things, I can also see that it will give me that annoying 'this device has not enough resources' message, because for some reason, it's multiplied the one bridge of the enclosure into many, and the one where the card sits has 0 resources allocated. I've had that error with the egpu on the original Mac system as well (installed bootcamp then, but I'm really trying to move away from Windows more).
Looking at online resources, I'm really really confused by now. Some say I should use the open source drivers, some say I absolutely shouldn't. I think I will leave the egpu alone for a moment and try and install DS first, does that make sense? Then I could at least use it in non-GPU mode already. I was wanting to use this guide:https://gist.github.com/llaurama/76c930a3f74741f83dd6453a22f411e1 . But I've mostly been a graphical UI Linux user so far, and just sloooowly starting to work my way more into the depths of things (because the darn egpu forces me to). It does seem to make sense to me though. Or am I overlooking something?
Would much appreciate any comments and ideas!
Edit: Yes, dual boot - I've kept macOS on the iMac and installed Manjaro into the Windows bootcamp partition. The iMac still thinks it's windows because the boot manager is still hanging around, which is kind of funny, but the systems seem to work really well side by side. I think on a Mac, I wouldn't ever ditch the macOS completely.
@tsroemi
I've had a look through that installation guide and I can't see any problems with it. Omit the Valentina CMS step though - that is genuinely unnecessary. I think that process could be cut down significantly but as I have zero experience of trying to do any of this with the combination of Mac+Manjaro I will defer to the author of the guide. There are a lot of belt-and-braces steps in there (the CMS installation looks particularly over-cooked to me) that complicate the procedure but there's nothing wrong with it per se - it will work. However, what can be skipped on a dual-boot Windows PC might not be possible on a dual-boot Mac. I simply don't know. My experience of Macs can be boiled down to compiling Unity C# code on it for IOS and then running away from it as fast as possible!
I also have zero experience of eGPUs with Daz software, let alone trying to get them to run in Linux. What I can say is that with internal GPUs you should be using the closed-source proprietary drivers provided by the distro where available, not open-source or those available on the Nvidia website, but other than that I can't really offer any help.
A quick look on the Arch wiki suggests enabling your eGPU could be a fairly complex operation - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/External_GPU
Which desktop did you choose? Manjaro offers desktops that use the older X11 (Xorg) protocol and the newer Wayland protocol; which you have will determine the approach you take to solving this.
On a more upbeat note I am sure we can fix your sound issues. One thing with Macs that makes troubleshooting them a little easier is a fixed set of hardware so it shouldn't be too tricky to get a Pipewire installation sorted out but this is definitely at the bottom of the to-do list.
@TimberWolf, again, many thanks for your take! I'm using the standard KDE Plasma that came with Manjaro. I thought that Xorg was the safe option since the iMac is so old, and was gonna go with that; I wasn't even aware that KDE has been switched to Wayland. I've been so out of the loop with everything, and I never had that much linux know-how to begin with ... This might not be a bad thing though, since the actual card I plan on using is an RTX 3060, so not decades old. I should be good with Wayland then, generally speaking, no?
The hilarious thing is that this is probably (at least part of) the reason why the card that I'm using for tinkering atm (the 3060 hasn't arrived yet) is not working. Because it's a GTX 1060, so what was that, Pascal? Way old in any way. No wonder I had no luck ...
Once I can put the 3060 in its Sonnet box, I'll probably be shot straight to the 'no resources' error which is what I got with a 5070 on the macOS itself. At least I'll be spared the driver problem hunting then I guess. In any case, you already did help me out majorly here, thanks!
The egpu thing, yeah I know, it's always a horror and will always be, no matter what the distros promise. But some egpu sites now seem pretty confident that Linux is not such a dead-in-the-water bet for egpus as it used to be, so I'm willing to give it my all this time. I'm so sick of being made to buy new electronics all the time. I have this lovely piece of hardware and I mean to use it as long as it will let me. Well, if it will let me, that is ...
Concerning sound, it would be nice to have it back at some point. Pipewire is set up, volume controls on the desktop are there and linked to the Audio Pro just fine, and they are even reacting. But still no sound. I'll absolutely get back to this once I figured the graphics stuff out and ask you to help me out with this as well if I may.
As for now, I think I'll try and set up DS tonight with the Wayland routine from the tut and see how that goes. I'll just not connect any card yet and leave out the Nvidia-related parts of the routine.
Purely anecdotally, that was my experience when I was running Ubuntu, but went away when I switched to Mint. After mature reflection, this may have been because Ubuntu would sometimes freeze and need to be power-cycled; and it was my impression that power-cycling (or resetting) Linux while it has an NTFS volume mounted is a lot more likely to cause problems than doing the same thing under Windows. In fact on more than one occasion the disk was left in such a state that CHKDSK froze while trying to fix it.
To be fair, that Ubuntu set-up was my first Linux daily driver, and I very likely broke something while learning the ropes.
@tsroemi
I am sure you have already found this, but on the off-chance you haven't, there is a script to enable Thunderbolt eGPUs specifically for the KDE Plasma desktop available on the egpu.io forums. Although the initial thread is a few years old, the code appears current:
https://egpu.io/forums/thunderbolt-linux-setup/all-ways-egpu-script-for-wayland-linux-desktops/
Repo here:
https://github.com/ewagner12/all-ways-egpu?tab=readme-ov-file#installation
I wish you the best of luck with this but I suspect you've got a fight on your hands...
@English Bob
My issues stemmed from using both Windows and Linux to write to the drive. Linux (both Fedora and CachyOS) would eventually render the file index unreadable by Windows which then needed a rebuild. Linux NTFS support is about as barebones as it gets and I personally wouldn't recommend it for drives that are used to store data. If you have executables that need to run natively in both Windows and WINE under Linux then the file system will have to be NTFS but exFAT is a safer choice for a drive or partition used for Daz content imho. I have played around with Windows ext4 and btrfs drivers but none that I tried could cope with anything other than a basic installation of the file system. I have never managed to get a casefold-enabled ext4 drive recognised by Windows.
@TimberWolf, the enclosure itself is already authorized, that seems to have worked!
Edit: Ah sorry, read too quickly, the link as well. I was thinking that I would only use the egpu for specific programs though, for DS and Blender and Davinci mainly. So I'm hoping to set it up specifically like this, not as the main primary video. Especially since the mac refuses to boot with it plugged in. Anyways, thanks again for the link and for the wishes, am going to need them sorely probably
@tsroemi
So essentially you want to use the iMac's Radeon card as the display GPU and the Nvidia eGPU as a compute device. Hmm. You should be able to get your Manjaro OS to boot with the eGPU attached but I am not convinced you will be able to get the exact setup you want. I would suggest just trying to get it to work in whatever configuration the script will allow, certainly initially, before attempting anything more ambitious.
Your sound problems stem from the fact that there is no driver built into the Linux kernel for the Cirrus Logic CS8409 processor used by your Mac - you'll have to add the driver manually but it's fairly straightforward as the drivers are stable and have been in the Arch AUR repositories for a few years now. I was a bit surprised by this as most common sound and networking hardware is covered by the kernel these days but it's a straightforward trip into the console to get it working.
@TimberWolf, my little old iMac is even more basic than that, it doesn't have a dGPU at all, just the Iris chip ...
Yes of course, I'll take basically any working configuration the system will give me, as long as DS is somehow part of the mix. But the problem with the Mac not starting properly at all with the egpu attached runs deeper than Manjaro, because the macOS won't start with it either. I seem to recall that last time I tried, the screen went black right after the Mac icon, so before I even got to the boot loader for the OS's. I'm not keen on repeating that ... I couldn't try anything with the Mac at all today for lack of time unfortunately, but I'm hoping for tomorrow.
Cool about the sound, that really should be an easy fix. I didn't imagine it would be something so basic!