Blender in Linux or FreeBSD?

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1

Can you advice the most optimal configuration of linux for making rendering the fastest. May be it will be any “Live CD’s” or anything else. If I plan to use in linux only Blender without any other programs

2

FreeBSD definitely rules if you want stability and little resources used. If you can handle using it, and all you want it for is rendering, that’s the way to go.

Linux is a bit more friendly, and also usually starts out more ready for every day use. If you want a good os that you can use for more things, you should go with Linux, personally I recommend Ubuntu, although there are many to choose from (one of my friends uses OpenSUSE, and Mandriva, and Gentoo is a more technical distribution).

In general, you’ll want as few things running as possible, to allow Blender the most RAM.

I’m not exactly an expert in these things, however, so perhaps someone else can give you some more advice.

3

FreeBSD is a very good option. Have used it myself and it totally rocks!

4

Build the OS, libs and programs optimized for the hardware you’re using. This makes sure you are using all registers available, and all extensions supported, as well as being able to compile the code with options like vectorization turned on.

Gentoo is great for that. (It’s easy to hose your system if you don’t know what you’re doing though)

5

Gentoo is sort of to Linux as BSD is to Unix, so yes, if you want to go with Linux, Gentoo would be good.

6

May be you will advice something from this list (because it is hard for me to download ever 130Mb):

BackTrackLinux
Engarde_Secure_Linux
Inferno
Mandriva
PCBSD
Plan9
Ubuntu

(here may be not linux OS)

These systems I can download and I already have OpenSuse, Mandrake and as I have posted FreeBSD.

And what is about ReactOS? (like Windows)

7

Gentoo is pain in the ass to install, I would recommend Arch, which is optimized for i686 and very light on resources and thus very fast.
Reminds me of Slackware but with real package manager…:wink:

8

Does anyone know of any render tests done with a standard linux install (i.e. Ubuntu) vs BSD?

9

I’ve just done speed tests with windows 10, lubuntu, ubuntu, manjaro, and freebsd. ubuntu won, by a goodly margin… lubuntu, manjaro, and freebsd came in last…