What is the preferred way of installing Blender on Linux?
I have the option to install Blender trough the native software ‘store’ or trough snap.
I understand snap is a universal system so I may get updates faster, but it starts slower because it needs the load all the packages?
And the native distribution may integrate better and be more stable?
Is this correct?
I’m on Zorin OS 16 (based on Ubuntu)
Download it directly from the website and unpack with the program of choice or tar -xvf blender-release-number.tar.xz
Done.
Blender releases bundled with distros often lags behind what is available on the website, so if you want to run bleeding edge version - builds from website is what you really want.
I never runned snaps or even package from the repo. If I’m right there might be a unofficial launcher that can manage multiple versions that you download manually, but I never felt the need for it.
There is also the Flatpak app. I personally use the compressed builds from Blender’s site.
https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.blender.Blender
Both the Flatpak and the Snap version just makes it easier to install the newest updates. I personaly do not prefer them for Blender because they run in a sandboxed environment and sometimes you need to mess with their settings to get the networking or file access work.
That’s fairly easy to do with Flatseal. You can give any flatpak app full access to everything using it.
That said, I usually grab the .tar file from Blender.org, and unzip it into ~/.local/share/applications. Less hassle, and you get the newest versions the day of release.
In contrast to some flatpak, snap, appimage for some other software the direct download tar from blender.org always worked for me.