I got an old laptop that I’m trying to revive. I was an old timer linux from around 2012-2016 (mint mostly)
I’m thinking of going dual boot on my laptop. Will the lastest linux mint be ok for Unity? Will it load faster that a fresh installed windows 10?
Currenty that the laptop is in a mass due to multiple users it takes around 5 minutes to load an empty project!
It used to be fast with Unity versions 5.x though.
So to make it short…
What’s your take on Unity speed (project open and android build)???
What’s your take on mint vs other distro for Unity dev?
I recently created a new project in 2018.4 on Windows 10 and it took a few minutes just to finish opening the editor and importing all the default packages.
But once the project was ready to go, with all the appropriate library files created already, it opens fairly quickly now.
If you’re going to install Linux then Mint is a good choice, in my opinion.
I have unity running on a mint laptop too. It feels like compile times are noticeably slower than on my plain ubuntu machine though (i suspected that it may be due to the compiler selection script not recognizing mint as a supported ubuntu-derivative for using roslyn, but that’s really just speculation).
What i noticed on mint is that cinnamon exhibits some stuttering when mutlitasking if one of the apps wants to display realtime video.
Using Ubuntu with kde plasma desktop it’s a lot better for me, gnome was even more stutter free (although heavier othwise).
But this is a personal opinion, what i gathered from the interwebs is that it seems to heavily depend on specific setups and configuration. Plain Ubuntu with kde plasma was what worked for me without using arcane magic.
Keep in mind we officially only support Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04 and CentOS 7. All other linux distros/versions are unsupported, and you might run into unexpected issues when using them.
It is unfortunately not feasible for us to test Unity on more than a few Linux distributions, given the market share. Even on Windows or Mac, we don’t have to test on more than 2 OS versions generally, as both OS vendors try to maintain backwards compatible (which cannot be said about Linux - for instance, Unity broke on Ubuntu 19.04 badly since they removed a system library).
And we cannot claim support unless we know it works.
I switched to Solus because I got tired of things breaking with Ubuntu, so I’m not surprised by that. Maybe there’s a middle ground where rather than a version of Linux, the supported platform was the libraries you build against? Maybe have a “Platform Test” package to check things out?
The latest market share figures I’ve seen had over 20% of programmers using Linux, but only 7% for game development. Ubuntu is at about 40% of the distro share. So you are targeting a 3% base, when you could be trying to tempt the 20% to try game dev with Unity imho.
I fully get that the support may be an issue, I’ll leave it to you to decide whether drawing a line under the libraries rather than the distro would make things more manageable. Not being able to support 60% of the potential Linux user base is a rather large problem to have for both of us.
Market share? Linux Mint always had a larger market share than Ubuntu (check distrowatch.org and see) and besides:
Even it’s latest version is based on Ubuntu 18.04LTS)
I tried it and Unity works like a charm!!!
Seriously now? How did CentOS 7 end up in the supported list?
I would accept mint, openSuse, gentoo (for the hardcore linuxians!), debian, arch… those make sense (especially mint and openSuse but I’m getting out of my own topic so to make it right…
Linux mint vs Windows 10 on the same laptop is beyond believe! I’m talking about 5:1 time in opening a project!!! I’m presenting a speech/workshop tomorrow to 50 people about Unity thanks to linux mint (and Unity of course)!!! Thank you Unity community for improving linux support!!! Weheeeeeee
My guess is their commercial view of Linux is stuck a decade or so ago and thought they had to support a deb and a rpm system. Then they used their own install manager and made it a moot point.
The reason for Centos support is that it currently is the industry standard for the Film industry which is why we support it. Linux has always been a cat and mouse game on the support side of things not just in the game industry but also in hardware etc… I can recall a time when working for Netgear where we only supported a very specific version of Redhat and outside that we would not provide you any support.
The main reason for this is testing and resources, linux has such a wide area of coverage compared to windows and mac, each distro does their own special thing, updates things in their own special way and thats hard to keep up with when it comes to verification of what works and what doesn’t. So we looked at what some of the verticals need such as Film and we make sure it works there and then we looked at what was the most generally supported versions of linux and that was Ubuntu LTS releases at the time. This doesn’t mean that it won’t work on other distro but these are the distros we ensure they work on and support.
It had nothing to do with installer choice, or deb vs rpm or anything like that it was just a matter of what made sense at the time and the resources needed to support it. We are linux advocates as well and we are constantly looking at what makes sense for the platform. So when new distros are making the rounds and such we aren’t blind to that but we also have to do what makes sense.
@ from what I can tell Ubuntu Studio is just normal Ubuntu with just some extra stuff added to it. So I mean if you install it and its just standard Ubuntu 18.04 with some extra applications installed it should be fine but we do not test or verify that it works on the Ubuntu Studio download specifically.
As an answer to the opening post I’ve made some tests to measure how long it takes to load a project in Windows 8.1 (fresh re-install yesterday) and Ubuntu 19.10 (fresh install 3 days ago).
Although Windows 8.1 is not Windows 10 but they are not very different actually, I’ve been working in Windows 10 for a year and then I’ve installed 8.1 and don’t feel any difference (except the fresh air and freedom from forcibly installed updates, useless bloat processes, 25% CPU load and 50% RAM load in idle state on Windows 10, haha).
Same for Ubuntu and Mint. Mint is pretty much the same thing as Ubuntu except some additional preinstalled apps and a tiny difference in desktop environments performance.
So, first of all I’ve preloaded the same project in both systems to emulate an everyday basis workflow, then made the measurings on fresh system load, Unity Hub load and then the project load (it’s a testing grounds project with like 50+ scripts and 10 objects on the scene). So, the results are:
Ubuntu:
system load to the desktop - 35 sec.
Unity Hub load - 6 sec.
Project load - 3 min 25 sec.
Windows:
system load to desktop - 28 sec.
Unity Hub load - 42 sec.
Project load - 2 min 29 sec.
The rig: laptop with i7-7700HQ, HDD 7200rpm, 16 GB RAM.
Unity version is 2019.2.15f1 on both platforms.
Yeah, it’s just one iteration, so it’s not a reliable statistics at all, but that’s how it actually goes in my experience. Some thing are faster on Windows, others are faster on Linux, but an overall experience is quite the same on both OS’s.
Please, PLEASE reconsider this. Ubuntu is rapidly approaching vendor-lock status, keyed to utilities with which many users are uncomfortable. I realize that supporting multiple distros is a nightmare almost akin to supporting another OS, but Mint is Ubuntu-based, and should be relatively easy to support, but it’s taken several steps toward user freedom where Ubuntu is stepping away.
I realize that distro is a user preference thing, and I’m not here to evangelize, but the bottom line is that I’ve resolved never to give Canonical money if I can help it, but I’m still stuck with Ubuntu. I’m stuck with Ubuntu because it’s the Debalike with vendor support, and it’s the one with vendor support because it’s popular. It’s the same cycle I’m trying to escape in moving to Unity on Linux.
And I’ve no particular affinity for Mint or any other Debalike, but Mint is the one that’s built on Ubuntu without being Canonical, so please, please re-evaluate the difficulty in supporting it officially. Mint, or Debian proper. Doesn’t matter, just please give us a choice that isn’t sorry-Ubuntu-has-all-the-market-share-so-use-it.
