I have a big personal project I’m working on and rendering will eventually be a big deal! Linux is apparently best as far as speed is concerned, which it is, greatly. Thus, I’m wondering if there are some distros that are better suited for blender or if it matters.
Now, for myself, I don’t plan on using it much, just to render, so usability means little to me, I just need to get it working well with 2 980tis.
Regarding performance Blender works the same in most distributions of similar age. If it is only for render, you could try using lightweight desktops like Xfce or LXDE, and also the installer to them will be smaller. Note, you must install nvidia proprietary driver from distro repositories, and it is recommended using official Blender.
Regard to the GTX 980 Ti problem in Windows 10, you try Blender from Buildbot that there are people reporting improvements:
https://builder.blender.org/download/
Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Other Software”
If you’re running without a GUI, it doesn’t really matter much at all so long as you can get recent releases. I’d recommend going with whatever is easiest for you to install.
Oh nice, that build makes it a reasonable 34 seconds! Linux should be in the 20s then! Hey, does having 2 cards help at all with the render view?
EDIT
28 seconds with 4 tiles.
If nvidia/blender fixes the problem with Windows 10 (and Mac?), there is no reason to think that Linux will be faster on GPU. Linux is a bit faster on CPU.
Anyway, you install and learn Linux. It is fun and can be useful to you in another occasion.
Most of the popular Linux distro’s are very similar under the hood,
so I don’t think you would notice significant difference between (Ubuntu/Debian/Centos/Fedora/Suse).
Aside from minor differences in library versions.
If you’re not sure, suggest Ubuntu or Debian (server version if they’re dedicated systems),
its been used to render feature films before and easiest to troubleshoot being most popular.
There is already good tips, but I’ll specify one thing: Search for distro, that has about the latest proprietary Nvidia drivers in their repository. I mean it: IN repository. This way the drivers are fully supported and installing AND updating is the easiest thing ever.
About 10 years ago I was using a distro that had old drivers in repository, so I installed and updated the drivers directly from Nvidia website. It worked, but I can’t recommend it to somebody with little or none experience of it.
The main question is an availability graphical and media software in disto’s repository. Not only blender.
For example http://djv.sourceforge.net/ , http://ngplant.org/ , http://www.vapoursynth.com/ , http://www.openvdb.org/ …
Try to find this software in your distro.
Of cource you may to compile eatch one, but this is not useful and gracefully.
This is a thing, because i created own repository CG https://github.com/brothermechanic/cg
Especially see on this https://github.com/brothermechanic/cg
What do you ting about this?
and of course it can be automatically updated!
I suggest you ArchLinux/Manjaro or Sabayon, they have the latest Drivers and Apps in their repository.
https://www.sabayon.org (only for advanced users, has no graphical interface for installing packages/apps)
And use a lightweight environment like XFCE, LXDE or Fluxbox because it uses less Memory then the KDE or GNOME Desktop.
Important for Blender is the NVidia/AMD Driver version(newer is better and should support GPU[CUDA/OpenCL are sometimes seperate Packages]) and the Desktop environment(more free Ram).
I’ve learned much about Linux with Virtualbox, a virtual environment for running/installing or testing all sorts of Distros.
https://www.virtualbox.org/
I used to have Windows 7 with Ubuntu in Virtualbox installed because of the great Opensource software Linux has to offer like Kdenlive, Openshot, Darktable… later i switched to Linux completely.
Hope that helps 