The Blender Linux experience

My computer usage predates the PC, but since the dawn of the PC, I’ve used DOS, Windows 3, Windows 95, Windows XP, BeOS for a few years, then OS X, finally back to Windows 10 and now I just can’t do Windows 11. It’s simply too much spyware, adware, telemetry, big brother corporate bullshit enshittification.

So here I am, my first Linux experience. And… it’s surprisingly good!

However, the Blender experience is… surprisingly bad!

  • The distro I chose comes with a special version of Blender, apparently due to licensing of codecs and drivers and some other support issues, but it’s an outdated version and unsure how often it updates.
  • Trying to go to the Blender website and downloading it directly yields a terribly slow-loading version which completely disregards my desktop environment (Gnome) and can’t size its dialogs properly.
  • Using the Software app and getting the Flatpack version gets me fast loading, ffmpeg rendering movies, seemingly OptiX and all version, but which also disregards the desktop environment.

It’s the first and only app I’ve tried so far which behaves this way.

Comparatively, I downloaded Unreal Engine and even though it’s only officially supported on Ubuntu, and I’m on a Fedora variant, it worked flawlessly (also very surprising).

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All those times when I couldn’t find the right word? Thanks to you now I have!

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You’re using Nobara, aren’t you?

The reason for this is because all Fedora based distros default to the Wayland compositor, and some goofiness with how it handles server side window decorations means you won’t (yet) get native title bars on some applications.

You can fix this by logging out, hitting the little gear button along the bottom right of the login screen, and changing it to Gnome on X11.

It is always recommended to use the official version of Blender. Have you downloaded the 3.6 LTS tar.xz file from here?:

Could you explain the problem better? Do you have a single screen/monitor? Could you show the problem with screenshots?

Try to open official Blender 3.6 more than once, sometimes crazy things happen with Blender GUI after consecutively opening different versions of Blender.

Edit: You do what @Renzatic recommended. I didn’t know that Fedora was already using Wayland by default

For the sake of other people running into this same problem…

What he’s seeing is this:

When what he wants is this:

That’s just me flipping between the two compositors. Also, the option is Gnome on Xorg, not X11 like I said previously. Click on your user icon so you see the password field, and you’ll see the gear at the bottom right.

Thanks, but I can’t take credit. It seems to be a fairly common word to describe corporate product development decisions these days. :sweat_smile:

Spot on. So I guess I managed to switch exactly during a paradigm shift? Although from what I’ve read, Wayland has been going for close to a decade now? But perhaps Fedora 38 is the first time it became the default.

Also, the screenshots you posted doesn’t make it seem that bad, but any dialog Blender pops up, like open file, preferences or render window, can’t be resized and sometimes have the wrong scaling.

I must admit, X11 was a big reason I didn’t even consider Linux for many years. It’s been laughably outdated tech for decades. Wayland was what removed my last doubts about the OS (and holy shit is it ever so smooooooth)!

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I really don’t notice any real differences between the two in day to day usage. What’s smooth in Wayland is also smooth in X11 for me. The reason why it’s such a big deal is because, like you said, X11 is as old as the hills, and DE developers have had to implement some hacky workarounds to get it to perform like a modern compositor. The new framework is about future proofing and ease of development moreso than it is performance or features.

I still use X11 mostly because Wayland is still a little flaky on Nvidia hardware. It’s not as bad as it was, but I still do get the occasional window flicker, or weirdo random display bug.

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Look here if you can find similar problems related to Wayland:

If you don’t find anything similar by searching with the word “wayland”, perhaps you should open a new report giving as much information as possible related to your problem.