Advice for a new linux user?

Hi, this is my first post here.
I’ve grown frustrated with Microsoft and Windows, so Im looking to give Linux a shot. There are a couple important things that I want to double check before I make the plunge.
About me: Im a 3D modeler and rigger. I have a technical background, but only a little experience with computer languages and OSes. Im hoping to learn Linux and Python in the near future.

Can the helpful folks of this forum direct me towards a distro that will best support the following?

*Run blender 2.78+
*Have basic support for Wacom Inutuos Drivers
*Ideally run Substance Painter, Autodesk Maya, Zbrush, Photoshop
*Support multimonitor setup.
*Support using one 4k monitor and two 1080p monitors at once

My second question is: When I install Linux, should I make a new partition on my 960 EVO 512gb SSD, or install a new drive for Linux?

My PC specs are:
Ryzen 7 1700X 3.8gHz
Asus Crosshair VI Hero
Asus GTX 1080ti Strix
Corsair RGB 32gb 3000mHz
Corsair HXi 750
Lian Li PC-O9
lots of ssd and hdd storage
Custom watercooling

couple of things:

  • You can run blender on any distro that can run steam, the repo versions are usually out of date anyway, so this is probably the most convenient option

  • Wacom tablets have had kernel drivers and a xorg plugin since late 2012, so no worries there.

  • multi monitor should work fine out of the box on the nvidia proprietary drivers as long as you don’t use a distro that comes with wayland, and multi-resolution is ok (hidpi is a mixed bag but all the screens should play nicely)

so really you can use whatever. for that stuff.

maya works best on CentOS, as do many other autodesk products. Photoshop cs6 will run in wine with a little tweaking.

Substance painter works flawlessly in wine, and zbrush will too with a little persuasion. Just don’t expect any 3d programs you run in WINE to run at full speed.

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You could install Linux on its own hard drive. This will allow you to choose the boot device on startup in the bios. Many people like to dual boot sharing the grub boot loader but this makes the system more likely to have issues down the road since Windows doesn’t like to share grub.

While you can use wine for Windows applications, I wouldn’t recommend using it for anything mission critical. This is an unpopular opinion but I would recommend running Linux native applications on Linux and Windows only applications on Windows. It all depends on how much time your willing to spend troubleshooting potential problems and how important the work is.

As far as distros go I would try something well supported such as Fedora, or CentOS.

that’s what refind is for.

it really isn’t. Normally I Wouldn’t recommend it but I use 2 of those 3 applications daily and they work quite well.

OP, if you do go the wine route, use playonlinux to make sure each application you install is on a separate prefix, and don’t install anything in the dfault drive.

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Didn’t know about the refind boot manager. That’s pretty cool.

it’s pretty useful, yeah. It’s the only way to dual boot BSDs easily or run alternative operating systems on those older macs with hybrid uefis.

This shouldn’t be a problem, blender will work on any distro, versions may very from distro to distro; but you can always try custom repos etc, additionally you can get blender as a snap.

Wacom is well supported I believe.

Some of these may work in wine, but I wouldn’t bank on it and I wouldn’t expect performance to be very good in wine.

This works great, just make sure you’re using the driver from nvidia.

I’m using a 1440p and 2 1080p monitors and it works great, not 4k but close enough.

You’re probably better off running linux on a separate drive.

just use refind.

I’m not going to vouch for something that I’ve never heard of before.

it’s a very feature rich bootloader/manager with 15ish years of code maturity, can chainload literally anything, completely prevents all the win10 hissy fits over grub.

How are boot times?

you can set them to whatever you want in the config file, default it’s like a 5 second delay to let you choose your OS, you can set it to shorter though

Thank you everyone for your help! Ill explore the options youve given me. Sounds like I should research CentOS, Fedora, and Wine. Can anyone recommend a good video series on Linux from the ground up? I saw several multi-hour courses on youtube, but Im unsure which to watch first. Thanks again!

If you’re really wanting to dive into learning Linux I would recommend this book. It’s cheaper than some course texts I’ve used and is full of useful information. From personal experience I’ve had better luck with books than YouTube since half the people on YouTube seem to just copy other tutorials without giving detailed information.

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