Should I go back to linux mint?

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?

Thank you for your time fello devs!

 

Unity is getting slower over the years.

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.

 

It's slower than ever. My HDRP project took ~7 minutes to load.
But that depends on how good your CPU is.

SRP projects take longer than built-in default projects.

 

I'd seriously consider Ubuntu Studio too. I'm thinking of switching back to it after a few years on Solus.

Ubuntu Studio is tweaked for low latency audio production and designed as a creative studio, so it hits a lot of game dev requirements out of the box.

 

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.

 

Just an observation but I can't help but think this support policy misses the fact that a lot of Linux culture is built around choice.

I rarely report bugs because dual booting into a supported Linux to test and report takes too much time.

Does the Ubuntu support include variants like Ubuntu Studio? I might as well scrap my plans to switch to it if it won't address the dual boot issue.

Do the support limitations extend to builds or just the editor?

Are plans to support other Linux versions on the timeline at all?

I'd really like to go all in on Unity dev, but for Linux only users, you don't make it an easy choice.

 

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:
1. Even it's latest version is based on Ubuntu 18.04LTS)
2. 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.

 

What about Ubuntu Studio?

https://ubuntustudio.org/

 

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.

 

So it seemed to me; I asked in case.

Now I consider switching to CentOS. I don't remember people using Unity under CentOS complaining here...

 

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.

 

CentOS offers two versions of their distribution, which is best to use Unity with?

https://centos.org/

 

Thank you. How will I know when you support Unity for CentOS 8?

 

Thank you!

Any advice for the new user I am about using CentOs for Unity?

 

I get that. I absolutely get that. I don't think I made my problem clear: Canonical is doing a number of things that make me more than just uncomfortable. They're Microsofting the Linuxsphere. Most of the software I use is not supported on CentOS.

Allow me to rephrase: I am a Unity developer. I want to use Linux for work. I am horrified by Canonical, but Unity Technologies has decided what distro I am going to use. That's not hyperbole, I'm a Unity dev, if I want to use Linux for work, I have to use a distro you support.

*Just* the nonsense surrounding Snappy should be enough to illustrate why being forced to use Ubuntu is unacceptable. When I say literally any other Debalike, I mean it. I don't care what distro it is, I just don't want to be held captive by a company that's trying its hardest to find ways to corner the Linux market, commercialize its nuts off, proliferate a "convenient" package manager that's essentially a FOSS backdoor... I just want *Linux*.

Which, I suppose, brings me back to my original suggestion: just support Debian-GNOME, if you want to KISS, and tell people to run *Ubuntu* at their own risk.

I want to leave Canonical for exactly the same reasons I want to leave Microsoft, and, no kidding, you guys are the ones who won't let me leave them.

 

Im just about to start dipping my toes in Unity. Im running it on Arch with XFCE. Seeing as your also runing it on the same distro, is there a window manager that works better then others? Based on what I read in this thread it would make sense if Gnome was the least buggy.

 

That's weird. In my case Linux mint project lead was around 2 minutes where Windows 10 project load more than 5!!!
I doing new tests right now because that's the laptop I'll get with me on the upcoming game jam

 

Probably anti malware software is running in the background. Update service and Superfetch are also known as the main reasons of Windows 10 slowness, that's why I always kill them as soon and often as possible.

 

And this is the reason why lots of Companies refuse to release for Linux Distros there are 200+ choices out there and no one wants to choose only one to use. This would be ridiculous to dev against you would need 200 systems to make sure everyone's applications played nicely, I am just grateful they released it for any distro at all...