All true. Could be worse. Could be SGI.
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Oh jeez. Yeah. I’d completely forgotten about the days when I dreamed of getting my hands on a second hand Octane 2.
Only if you had the literal key to the box.
Yes kids, once upon a time, you needed a physical key in order to turn on a Flame.
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Could you tell me what Linux admin tasks you specifically/generally struggle with?
Just anything that isn’t human-normative gestural visual things. Basically anything that you have to type into a shell. It’s 2022, we should be living in the Future, not 1967.
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Irix 4 life.
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All of it. I struggle with all of it.
A few years ago I built a windows PC and decided to dual boot into Centos to see if I could get Flame running, but because I was on a homemade computer the Autodesk distro didn’t have the right drivers, specifically for the wifi and graphics,. I had to download drivers (on my mac), put them onto a thumb drive, mount that drive via the kernel in linux in order to install the wifi and then the nvidia driver, just to get the machine to be capable of booting to something other than a 1983 era shell.
Of course I don’t know which driver is going to work, or even how to find out which brand of modem I have, so I’m googling things. There are no clear answers. It’s like I can only read the text from an oblique angle. I’m looking at groups of words I recognize but dont comprehend, searching for a clue that will help me phrase the next google search better, so I can inch my way closer to learning how to mount a fucking thumb drive in the shell (step 1, how do I get to a fucking shell?) because the goddamn graphics shit the bed as soon as the login screen comes up and once that happens I have to button the machine cos nothing works.
I got it all working okay eventually, but updated the OS and had some other issue and gave up.
I got a mac trashcan second hand, flame installed easily and ran without issue, and while it may have taken 30 minutes to do that render test benchmark, none of my renders took that long so I was happy.
Some people like model trains, some people like hiking, some people like suntanning on the beach, some people like tinkering with linux. I won’t begrudge anyone’s joy, but holy hell do I never want to go back. Linux is my cosmic horror.
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Just so I can snippet this for the Hollywood Reporter — you’re saying that you love Linux and all things command line.
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(Fairly sure that the comment was meant for Andy not myself but I’ll bite haha)
Not all things ought to be in shell. But I find it incredibly powerful and honestly more ‘human-normative’ than a lot of GUI applications which are often confusing/annoying/heavy. An example: I want to transcode a video to h264.
so I open a shell and…
ffmpeg -i input.mov -c:v h264 output.mp4
You can even omit the codec flag if you like. Super simple. I can’t think how that task could be made simpler. It’s not difficult. I find that incredibly human-normative: It follows a very linear thought process to actuate what I want the computer to do.
How many clicks do I have to do that with handbrake?
There are countless examples of tasks like this. And for anything more complex you can save tasks as bash scripts and automate things easily. Its very hard to automate something that has a GUI.
True… Or just drag the video and select “h264”. It’s the same thing, just diffrnt strokes.
I cannot hold text strings in my head. I’ve tried to do various computer code things. I’ve made webpages, I’ve written C# and Python. I’ve spent plenty of time in the command line, but none of it sticks.
I don’t mind clicks. Clicks are easy. Flame is all clicks. Mac is all clicks. I like it.
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You just typed a long string of text! So forgive me if I don’t believe you
(I can’t write any C…I’m hopeless. One day I would love to learn.)
I guess the point I’m wanting to push back on is that you don’t have to be a tinkerer or have Linux as a hobby to use it or reap its benefits. Its not complicated, it just requires a few key bits of information-- like any other operating system/software.
Sorry to hear about your lovecraftian trauma, though. If your attempt was made on CentOS 7.x I can understand. Linux desktop has come a long way in the past 10 years.
While you may enjoy eating meat that doesn’t mean that other people enjoy eating meat despite their ability to do so.
Folks have different priorities than just performance on the tools they use. Just like they do in the food they consume and trade-offs tend to be common-place.
As completely cracked out as it sounds, I prefer running my Linux box over RGS to a Mac client because… it’s a fucking mac. So much so that I’m considering adding a m1 mini as a client at work just to have the same experience.
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My two cents and I have been running Linux at home for a while now, I will wait and see if autodesk can get a native build by the time the new mac tower comes out then i will more than likely go that route, reason being some apps don’t run on linux and its a drag to have two computers at home when its not really necessary but I realize I can sort of hack together some fixes but I like dropbox native, affinity photo, particle illusion and just the overall ease of use and the speed difference isn’t all that great especially if they make it native which I am guessing will be close to ready by end of year
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Naaative flame! Naaative flame! Naaative flame!
I would love to hear from an official standpoint that native Metal / M(x) support is being worked on. 
ADSK from a business standpoint would certainly sell more licenses. Linux, MacOS, Cloud. Quite the trifecta.
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Hey Eric, I can assure you that the team is working really hard, in collaboration with our partners, on (1) having a native arm64 build and (2) fully leveraging modern Graphics API such as Vulkan & Metal (via MoltenVK). However, we can’t share any ETAs on these initiatives at this moment.
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Party.
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Best news I’ve wanted to hear since macFlame was released!
I’ll be saving my lunch money for a Mac Pro / Studio Upgrade in the future…
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That is exciting news… tip the messenger! (I mean bribe)
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