It's been a while, now is the time

Coffee break
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HI there!

I have been tinkering with WSL to familiarize myself with Linux and refresh my Linux knowledge. I have been running exclusively through a shell. The GUI is unbearable slow.

Now I put a 2TB super fast disc in my system and I am ready to go all in.

I have identified that I will continue to use Photoshop and foremost Lightroom (catalog with thousands of photographs. While I am tinkering with Darkroom and love it, I still will have some overlap for the foreseeable future. Plus I have one app which I cannot replace (for now), which is 3D Vista, a virtual tour software. There is alternatives and some even from the 3D Vista community. Because their support plainly put, SUCKS! Closed boomer-book group. Errrrrrrmmmmmmm, nope!

Now I’d like to get input from you guys, if my plans are outlandish, or feasible.

My rig is a AMD 9950X, 96 GB memory, Geforce 4090, Wacom tablet, Logitech mouse and keyboard (Craft and G502 Lightspeed). Form the mouse I hope that I can at least continue to use the charging pad. I hope it only takes power and doesn’t need Logitech’s bloatware. Solaar?

The main work I will be doing on this machine is working on WordPress sites. That’s a no brainer. Find a local WordPress emulator, like WP-Local. Then I retouch my own photography (large panos and various photos in general). I will run ComfyUI for my AI work. I am aware that I will probably bite the table about the speed of Photoshop on this system, and probably keep a Windows install, just in case. Maybe Lightroom as well. Or then go full force Darkroom and Gimp at some point.

  1. I plan to put install OpenMandriva on a approximately 500 GB partition on that drive and use the rest for Linux documents and AI models etc. Is that a good idea? That’s how I worked with Windows for decades. I could reinstall my OS at any time, without loosing anything (settings etc. backed up at all times)
  2. Get color management going, so I can calibrate my monitor. I have a ColorNavigator version for Linux, directly from EIzo. Should be wonky, but probably works.
  3. Install apps (ComfyUI, PTGui, OpenOffice (or equivalent), DavinciResolve, Darkroom, Gimp etc. etc.
  4. Install Winboat to attempt to run Windows apps, without Windows
  5. Become a happy Linux user in a free world (without Neil Young, unfortunately)

Any hints from you guys, concerning my procedure, so this doesn’t become a nightmare, would be greatly appreciated. Or pointing out some show stoppers also helps.

Thanks & Cheers,
Alex

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Welcome back Alex,

Right off the bat, the biggest issue you’re going to have it with the video card. A 4090 is great but only so-so in tux. So I would recommend some bare metal testing - in both OM and a couple other distros (Mint and Manjaro/Arch) for driver support for that card. But others can speak more to that.

Wacom I know works well in linux (I have one) but I forgot to test that in OM . Last I looked though, Krita worked really well with wacom. In fact you may find that with the options available in tux you can easily hop between programs like gimp, inkscape, krita, kden, obs, darktable, blender and much more for any given task. I know people that do exactly that.

Solaar works really well - I have several wireless keyboards and mice.

As for wordpress, don’t waste your time with an emulator. Set up a virtual machine (virtualbox or virt-manager) with a debian/devuan/ubuntu/om webserver with webmin, php, apache, mariadb and you’ve got all you need. With 96 GB of ram that vm will only need 6gb max. Youtube has a ton of vids on how to do that. The advantage of virtualbox is that you can start right now on windows then use that same vm on linux (VB is cross platform). When you’re more familiar with it, you “get fancy” and have all your files from the vm actually stored in a directory outside the vm (a shared folder)

BTW - same thing for libreoffice, gimp, darktable, etc. Almost all of those already run in windows so you may want to play with them that way first.

Since linux will be on it’s own drive, you’re effectively got a multiboot system.

Winboat, wine, bottles, etc you’re going to have to experiment on that. Again a windows VM might come in handy for things like that though there are issues with graphics cards. A linux vm using kvm/qemu/virt-manager will be able to better use the GPU than virtualbox; so you could try a tux vm with wine, bottles, etc if you want to keep windows out of the way.

500GB is HUGE. You won’t need more than 128 TOPS - because all your stuff is on another partition/drive. You could even get away with 64GB for the OS. Especially since that’s what you’re already doing

Hope this helps.

PS: Foxclone is your friend…

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Thank you @SomeDudeInAZ !

So you’re saying that I won’t get the 4090 to work at all, or is it glitchy?

That’s pretty bad news… Plus, I have 3 screens. I can’t find much information on this forum. So I guess you’re all running OM on an AMD card, or a calculator watch :slight_smile:

If that doesn’t work flawlessly, this becomes a show stopper.

Anyone have suggestions for a distro without rainbow puffs all over, which fully supports Nvidia?

As for the rest. Thank you for the valuable information! I did work for decades in OpenOffice on Windows and I did test run the apps in question on Windows, if they exist on Windows. Generally I liked what I experienced. Except, right off the bat I was unable to mount my Theta Z1 (360 cam) in Darktable. Which I do not understand. It’s like community: “Hey, try this Lightroom killer, you will love it” - me: “I did not even get to import an image…”

The 500 GB idea stems from large catalogs and caching and so forth, which will probably happen on the system disc. Maybe I put two versions with 256 GB each, so I have a playground and a production environment. I am capable, but also capable of trashing a system in no time.

Thanks again & cheers!

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In regards to the 4090 you’d have to test it. Search through the forum. When I left windows in 2019 I was using Nvidia and even with the dedicated drivers the nouveau ones seemed “better”.

But I was using much older cards (GTX 660). When I finally got around to building a new rig I went AMD.

It also depends on what you want the 4090 to do. Some features will supposedly work better in windows regardless. You could experiment with one of the gaming focused arch distros. But again that depends on what you want that 4090 to actually do.

So depending on your needs you might be dual-booting tux and windows

I don’t think the number of screens makes a difference. I’m running dual Dell U3223QE monitors on my desktop no issues (OK, KDE is annoying).

DuckDuckGo Search terms "Theta Z1 camera linux"

1. https://github.com/madjxatw/ricoh_theta_ros
2. https://community.theta360.guide/t/usb-api-and-linux/10948
3. https://support.ricoh360.com/manuals/theta-z1

What you might need to do is pull the photos off the camera and then import them into Darktable.

Every OS and DE has it’s own workflow.

When it comes to drive space I’m very much like you. ALL my data goes onto separate drives. Nothing in my home directory other than configs, and even most of those are in the process of migrating.

I know Darktable will let you put your categories, DB, and other stuff just about anywhere - even an external drive. And what Darktable won’t do on it’s own can probably be fixed with a symlink.

Caching is always an issue. I don’t know how much of your ram actually get’s used in what you do (I don’t use any AI models - just virtual machines) vs how much space on the drive is required. 96GB of ram should give plenty BUT uncompressed graphics can eat that up fast. So you’d have to do some testing. If you’re doing that much disk caching though I’d seriously consider adding ram or at least a 2nd ssd as a dedicated cache drive. You did say this was a work computer right?

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If I may weigh in on the nvidia issue, as I owned a 1080 before, most of my problems were with Fedora (yeah, i used that thing before the world became crazy) updating its kernel and the drivers becoming unsupported by it, needing a new driver update to be released so I could then update to it, and have it catch up with the new kernel. This problem is non-existant with AMD gpus, since the driver is baked in the kernel. I made the switch as fast as I could when I got a new pc.

I understand it is not always feasible, so do get yourself something which won’t change kernels a lot, perhaps OMLx Rock rather than ROME, again, assuming that what I faced would be an inevitable thing here too.

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I did search through the forum here. Unfortunately there’s no real information on this that’s newer than 2018 or so. Only people saying that it doesn’t work. Especially someone mentioning that multiple monitors are a no-go…

To me it’s not feasible to jump horse to AMD. I have invested too much money in 3080s and 4090s…

I will retouch photos, large panoramas, 20k plus pixels wide. I will do single shot retouching of my D850 material. I will do Blender. I will do web development. I have a NAS which could run my local websites for development, or go back to staging on an actual domain. And I will do AI work in ComfyUI and run local LLMs and RAGs and SD, FLUX, Wan, Qwen etc.

I don’t trust that we will be able to access the internet for much longer With the digital ID now being voted for even here in Switzerland, with 50.35% yes votes, I can clearly see that they are locking it down in Europe. Let’s hope this is the last push of the evil regime, that calls themselves “the good people”. Because if sanity doesn’t win this one in the end, or we’re doomed…

I will definitely keep Windows around in dual boot. But I would like to move things to Linux as much as possible.

I am currently running Ubuntu in WSL. Could I run OM in WSL to test drive my plan?

Because I also read about a lot of problems getting AMD GPUs up and running for anything, especially local AI. Besides the obvious Cuda support in AI that is perverted in my view, but it is what it is.

As for the Theta, there’s some USB driver thing that can be installed on Windows, but I did not get it to work. I anticipate a camera to “simply” mount as a drive and Darktable has to see that and access it. I tested it on Windows with Darktable, maybe it actually works on Linux. Thanks for the links!

That said, imho, Darktable does something different than Lightroom, which sees the camera without any issues. I am not going to copy images to somewhere and then importing them to Darktable. But I am aware that I will have to either this copy import dance, while I take up the issue on Darktable forums…

I have seen that Darktable can also keep catalogs and such on other drives. But I will have to learn that in depth, so for now, all I say can be taken as an opinion.

But I do need clarification form OM experts, if my 4090 will be a dead fish in a lot of water, on OpenMandriva. Because that’s a show stopper for me and I don’t want to waste any of your time and effort, if it is the case.

It runs flawlessly on Ubuntu through WSL. SO either Windows does something to make it work, but I did install the Nvidia driver, Cuda and cuDNN on Ubuntu, which would not be needed if WIndows was making my GOUs work in Linux.

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I will certainly go for Rock. I need stability. I want to produce content, not tinker with the OS. At least up to a certain point. I am tinkering with Windows as well. Keeping it on a certain release, adding or changing things in the registry etc. But in general, I want a productive system.

I am an artist, not a sys admin!

Now I know that many Linux users are going to say that if you use Linux, you need to know every aspect of the motor you’re running. But some of us just want to get the job done.

I don’t want to sound like a “wild Nelly”, but on the other hand, the Linux community will change in the future, with all us creators wanting to adapt it for actual work.

“Off course, a movement against something, will always end up, becoming what they were fighting.” (Alex Jones).

But also I know that a lot of studios in VFX are running Linux. So it must be possible. But they’re mostly on RHEL-based distributions…

Maybe I should look into Red Hat? Going from one woke beast to another woke beast. NO - that’s why I am here… For now.

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I’m no Nvidia expert, but looking at the version I have installed for my laptop, it’s version 575.51.02. This is the one in the repositories, installable from OM Welcome. If I go to Nvidia’s site and look up that driver, it looks like the cards you mention are supported:

My advice to you if you want to test without messing anything up would be to get a different hard disk/nvme/ssd, take out your current disk, put in the new one, and install OpenMandriva there. Then you can do as much experimenting as you want, and you’ve only invested about $100 in a drive you can probably use for something else anyway.

It’s the “nuke it from orbit; it’s the only way to be sure” method, but it works. :grinning_face:

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@alframe I will not sugarcoat this. 3 monitors and nvidia on Om is a f*ing disaster, I had a shit tone of problems on open suse with two monitors and RTX 3060. Linux mint worked but was slow as F fo whatever reason. I have NVME drive yet the overall os performance was trash.

I could not even boot an installer of Open mandriva using Nvidia RTX 3060. I was forced to use Apu build in my cpu. I manage to install RTx drivers jet the performance were trash and glitches where overwhelming.

Do not get me wrong, I love OM
I changed my GPU to radeon RX 7600 XT for the sole reason of being able to continuously use open mandriva.

I donate to the project regularly. I refuse to use any other linux distro then OM at that point. Even if that means rebuild my PC from scratch.

But that’s me. If for whatever reason, using nvidia is crucial for you, Open mandriva is most probably not your distro! Especially with 3 monitors. That will probably be a tech nightmare to manage

@sez11a got some good points in his post, check all stuff on another drive. But I doubt it will work with your setup

You can try with offical Nvidia drivers from Nvidia site. That beeing said. Om is not debian, fedora, open suse nor ubuntu I can’t tell you with any degree of certainty the installer or the driver will work with OM

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I agree with you. That describes 100% of the people I have “converted”. I am their tech support. The won’t even use google or anything else to look something up. And they were/are the same on windows or on their phones.

Heck they don’t even know the difference between “email” and the “internet” AND THEY USE WEBMAIL IN CHROME!!! :melting_face: :zany_face::exploding_head:

Oh it will (and you don’t sound like a “wild Nelly”). And it’s the “creators” who will have to do the heavy lifting (which may include paying people to do it - Red Hat or Canonical). If Adobe wanted to support linux they’d do it in a nanosecond. But it doesn’t make sense for them - right now with MS and Apple they work with 2 companies that have monolithic control of their respective OS. We (the end users) aren’t going to put custom compiled kernels on Win or MacOS so we get a few more frames in Cyberpunk or Doom.

I am an engineer (chemical), and also, not a sys admin!

But to do my job I had to fill that role too (and much more).

Right now Inkscape, Gimp, Scribus, Darktable, and everything else are put together (or at least started by) by people who are passionate about their “field” and were willing to put in the effort to “adapt” linux. Just like when I was still a practicing chemical engineering (back in the 1980s) designing and building control systems on an IBM XT with 2 (count 'em) 360k floppy disks, no HDD, and 640kb of ram (if you were lucky - usually it was 512). And we were “adapting” a business system for engineering and production. There was no “network connections” or usb.

I learned more about TTL and IEEE standards (and their variations) than I ever wanted to. But apparently I did an OK job since the US national fire and energy codes and various utility systems and programs (like time of day based electricity pricing) are based on some of the work I did back then.

At this point it’s time for you to experiment. We can’t keep designing and debugging in the ether. You’re already committed to rebuilding your system with a new ssd. Great. Slap it in, install linux and test. Try OM first, then Ubuntu, then Manjaro. It should take what? A weekend? You’ll know pretty quick if your hardware will do what you want under linux. At most a week of “downtime”, if initial tests look promising but don’t work out.

You’ve already said you don’t want to change your workflow…but with every windows version, every software iteration we’ve had to change workflow and adapt anyway.

You’re using your system for work. It’s not a hobby. If you can do what you do with linux GREAT. If that means some in MS and some in linux GREAT. If that means stay on windows or move to mac GREAT.

But it really is time for you to take the plunge and test it. And then put a write up somewhere (Reddit, a forum like this one) on what worked and what didn’t. So that will help the next person down the line.

Let us know how the testing went.

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I never had the chance to try OMV while having nvidia, but due to what I keep hearing about nvidia and linux in general, I wish you the best of luck.

I also produce content, I make music. I need something that works, though I do like tinkering with my system. But that is me.

OM Rock serves me well, in many different ways.

Frankly, driver issues are most related to kernel and nvidia. Nvidia is the issue here, not linux, in my opinion. Open the damned source code so people can build proper software for it. But NOO. They must be difficult.

As for RHEL, never used that. I’d rather use Debian if I really had to, Devuan to be more specific.

Again, best of luck. Do let us know how your journey goes. Test it out, see if you like it. Revert if necessary. (on spare non-crucial SSD, of course.)

–-edited content below–

To be fair, nvidia is a problem with anything Linux. The only reason it is an issue is because of drivers not being open source, so unable to be baked in the kernel as amd drivers are. So, anything that doesn’t change a lot is good if you need nvidia.

That said, I may have given the impression that Open Mandriva ROME would not be suitable for you since it changes a lot. I have just remembered one special thing that changes that a lot:

OpenMandriva is not $other-distro!

It is not gonna be stale like Debian, or too new like Arch and have stuff break. It won’t play dice with stability like Fedora and change a lot to try and push things forward too fast. It definitely won’t go crazy like Ubuntu and change things for religious reasons (Rust tools rather than GNU tools) and introduce issues. Open Mandriva is its own thing.

I have just installed ROME on a spare SSD. The kernel is the same as the one in ROCK. A nvidia card would work either way here. When it updates, probably every month or so if that much, there probably will be a driver ready to go with it from the nvidia folks (that assuming the newly released Open Source Nvidia driver [not nouveau] isn’t feasible yet; I’m out of the loop).

Others can comment more on this, and I only wish I had a nvidia card for testing, but I think both ROCK and ROME will be smooth-sailing.

Best wishes,

Fox

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Thank you all! Very valuable input. I am aware that I have to dive in. And I will.

I am currently enjoying a couple of days, semi off grid, in the Swiss alps. When I get back, there’s a few things that need wrapping up. I think I should be able to get going sometimes next week .

I will post my about journey and also get back to a few points in the above replies!

Cheers from high up & thank you all!

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I have identified that I will continue to use Photoshop

Man, Why don’t you just stick with Windows? A Win11 license costs around 2,50 $ on ebay or something like that. Linux is just not the system for this. It is just for writing Emails and probably buying some stuff on Amazon. Thats it.

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I would absolutely stick with Windows to be honest. I work on it since “99. Before that I was on Mac and Irix for a decade. So yeah, I would.

In fact, I paid about 200 bucks for the OS in those 26 years, and always had 3 - 5 active machines in production

But now they want an arm, a leg and your soul to be able to use the system.

And I guess Linux will be and already is, more popular because of that.

But hey, I wish you all the fun and satisfaction, using your OS to buy stuff on Amazon, which I don’t do btw, buy local, just saying.

I want an OS to enable folks to be productive., While I know that there’s the “elite” attitude of “you can”t compile Your own kernel, you’re not worth it”, I think that Linux can be very productive, once the attitude changes.

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I think a good start to become productive is to give up that idea to run Windows apps on Linux and switch to software that works on Linux. But there will be still a huge problem, that all multimedia related stuff on Linux crash from time to time. What means you will lose a lot of unsaved work.

Well, if I would be in creative industry I would choose some Apple device where I have operating system and hardware from same producer and edit my stuff unbothered and in peace.

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Win 11 is now stuffed to the gills with AI (even in Notepad, FFS), and feeds M$ telemetry up the yin-yang. Adobe has declared it can use your creative work to feed their AIs.

I’m old enough to remember when “Windows” meant you could run several programs simultaneously in different “windows". Now it means a window through which M$ (and whoever they decide to partner with) can spy on you, use the window to suck out your soul and sell it to whoever they like.

Having a computer and running Win 11 on it and saying that you own it is like having a bus pass and saying you own your own transportation.

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As a part-time creative person who published a book not only in print, but also on every ebook platform available (including Apple) using Linux and entirely open source tools, I can say it is possible and beneficial to do this. And I’m not held hostage to these programs by subscriptions or undocumented file formats to be successful.

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@Ivanity you do know that windows crashes too right? :wink: I mean I have a fairly decent side-gig fixing windows computers for people who do everything from accounting to video production. :money_mouth_face:

And Linux is the same. The workflow is different. Does some of the software “lag behind” somewhat? Yeah, maybe. But there’s no multi billion dollar company behind Gimp or KMyMoney (for example).

The ability to actually run MS programs on Linux is getting better because of Valve (a billion dollar company…)

@alframe is going through exactly the process that many of us (myself included) went through a bunch of years ago. We just had a couple big threads around Bill’s (@harkonnen007 ) windows to OM migration for his business.

Yesterday in fact I had to help (a new) client with some video work and I found these:

  1. HandBrake Documentation — AMD VCN
  2. Epos Vox on AMD Video Rendering

They’re a wedding photographer/videographer. Small family business. And they’re moving to Linux. Do they have sunk costs in time, training, and software (like Adobe plugins)? Yup.

It really just boils down to can you do the specific tasks you need to do. And then what is required to do them in the “new” way vs the “old” way.

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That statement reminds me of people in Chicago who have a CTA pass and claim they own the L. Don’t argue with those people. You can’t reverse brainwashing.

Windows NT4.0 and 2000. Back then, I had a box at work with a dual Pentium III setup. Start post-processing 3D CNC G-code in one window, minimize it, and then fire up a second session of the CAD-CAM software and start working on the next 3D tool path.

After a few minutes, the screen froze while both processors were busy generating something usable. The kids today freak out every time their cell phone display freezes. Back then, it was proof that you were accomplishing something.

Windows just isn’t what it once was. No spyware. No bloatware. Everything that was considered junk could be sent to the bit-bucket.

Surely, you jest. Windows never crashes. Bill Gates said so on that day 30 years ago when he was on stage with Jay Leno and proceeded to prove it. End sarcasm.

To be honest, despite my claiming to know nothing, the owner of the tool and die shop where I worked had me work many a Saturday afternoon working on ways around the Windows bugs, plus the hardware upgrades, network upgrades, and so on. I don’t believe most Windows users realize the amount of time and money they spend doing tasks devoted to maintenance and repairs.

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This, 100%.

Once we can get over the ideological component of it and welcome new users with open arms. The whole “free software” religion needs to go and the focus should be on the practical side of things. There are many practical reasons a normal person would want to switch to Linux.

A “free” (nothing is free) product is still a product. We should be welcoming new users by the droves due to the bad behavior of all the competition. More users means more resources to develop a better product. And yes, it is a competition, for resources and userbase.

Unfortunately the attitude instead is “We don’t care if you use our software” or “it’s free, don’t complain”. These are the attitudes of losers who want to pretend to be winners. gatekeeping their little territory to feel special.

It needs to change.

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