Why are macs very popular among Houdini users?

[Neil78]

Crunchbang does look very cool. I'm using Mint with xfce desktop and it's brilliant. Houdini runs a charm. Setup and standard stuff like email, web, drivers, OpenGL, hardware support etc etc is in my opinion a breeze in Mint. Well worth a look for new linux users like me.

[JonathanGranskg]

Crunchbang does look very cool. I'm using Mint with xfce desktop and it's brilliant. Houdini runs a charm. Setup and standard stuff like email, web, drivers, OpenGL, hardware support etc etc is in my opinion a breeze in Mint. Well worth a look for new linux users like me.

 

Yeah, crunchbang looks interesting. I'll have to try it on my old desktop because I couldn't get it to work on my old laptop. My laptop just kept shutting down few seconds after turning on. Same happened when I tried to install Ubuntu the first time, so the problem was not Crunchbang.

 

Edit: Got Crunchbang working on my old desktop. I'm in love.

Edited April 12, 2014 by JonathanGranskg

[jordibares]

I must confess using Linux is like making love to a cheese grater… if you have used IRIX or OSX you know what I mean.

[sebkaine]

If you love IRIX/NEXTSTEP UI Jordi , you have a clone on LINUX which is call Window Maker

http://jurassicsystems.com/

http://windowmaker.org/index.php

 

The nextstep UI is imo far better than OS X, no gadget and windows who pop-up everywhere ...

CrunchBang which is base on OpenBox is a clone of NEXTStep UI with a more modern approach and this is very close to IRIX 6 in the principle.

 

I can find more Bauhaus influence in CrunchBang than in OS X , and thus more Steve Jobs in it ...

Also crunchbang would offer you the opportunity to pay you hardware half the price for better perf imo !

 

Cheers

 

E

Edited April 14, 2014 by sebkaine

[abvfx]

I can find more Bauhaus influence in CrunchBang than in OS X , and thus more Steve Jobs in it ...

Also crunchbang would offer you the opportunity to pay you hardware half the price for better perf imo !

Bauhaus, now that's a word I don't hear often. I think it's a spot on observation. I have been using #! as they call it for about a year on my laptop, super nice. I have 12.04 LTS Xubuntu for about the same time on my home desk, just been too lazy to change it.

[jordibares]

If you love IRIX/NEXTSTEP UI Jordi , you have a clone on LINUX which is call Window Maker

http://jurassicsystems.com/

http://windowmaker.org/index.php

 

The nextstep UI is imo far better than OS X, no gadget and windows who pop-up everywhere ...

CrunchBang which is base on OpenBox is a clone of NEXTStep UI with a more modern approach and this is very close to IRIX 6 in the principle.

 

I can find more Bauhaus influence in CrunchBang than in OS X , and thus more Steve Jobs in it ...

Also crunchbang would offer you the opportunity to pay you hardware half the price for better perf imo !

 

Cheers

 

E

 

 

The problem I see with Linux is that there is not one vision, but multitude of interests and opinions and shows everywhere… UI is not the problem.

[SreckoM]

I use OpenSuse 13.1 KDE. Using Linux for some time and never used KDE before, but I am impressed with 13.1 so far. And I am using this on my MacPro (highly customized more hackintosh than Mac I might say). Houdini experience on Linux is much better than on OSX, but I do prefer working on OSX. More apps (Adobe especially), do not have to waste times with fixing stuff (why Dropbox suddenly stopped working). 

[jordibares]

Hi Srecko, I expect Houdini to keep ironing out the issues on Mac and I am pretty confident very soon the difference may be not that big a deal, then a few places may ask themselves what is the best overall option.

 

I dream of a MacPro with nVidia professional grade graphic card and Houdini working perfectly… then I will be very happy indeed.

[lisux]

This remember me to an old discussion:

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=26899&highlight=FreeBsd

How good would be to have BSD as an standard rather than Linux.

I love wmaker, actually I have been using my own version of window maker at the office until it H13 showed some incompatibilities with it.

But I really dislike the Linux ecosystem for an enterprises environment.

[Guest tar]

The OsX system needs 4 things to bring it up to par:

 

10bit display - not supported yet but 10.9.3 might as apparently the 4K standard requires it? 

 

Memory allocator - Jemalloc in Linux rules the roost for simulations, and Facebook apparently

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7852731/c-memory-allocation-mechanism-performance-comparison-tcmalloc-vs-jemalloc

 

OpenCL - buggy in OsX currently

 

OpenGL - should be good in next Houdini.

 

File system - I'm hearing that ext4 is better in Linux.

[malexander]

Apple's OpenGL support is still not quite up to Windows/Linux standards, which is to say the quality of Nvidia's and AMD's native drivers. Besides lagging in features a bit, which is really not a big deal at this point (GL4.1), even the newer core GL driver is very picky. It silently drops to software rendering when it encounters a situation it can't handle. It's pretty obvious when this happens (~1fps) but often not at all clear why it happens, which makes debugging these problems somewhat hit or miss. If I had to choose the next GL feature supported by OSX, GL_KHR_debug_output would get my vote (http://renderingpipeline.com/2013/09/opengl-debugging-with-khr_debug). A message explaining why hardware acceleration has been disabled would save me a lot of hair pulling -- which I could use these days :-)

[symek]

Hi Srecko, I expect Houdini to keep ironing out the issues on Mac and I am pretty consilfident very soon the difference may be not that big a deal, then a few places may ask themselves what is the best overall option.

 

I dream of a MacPro with nVidia professional grade graphic card and Houdini working perfectly… then I will be very happy indeed.

 

 

After years of listening how bad Houdini works on OSX and how many problems Apples puts upon developers of professional apps on every release of OSX and considering how much work is to be done in OpenGL in Houdini, how far from optimal it is in a platforms Houdini is practically used in productions and how limited SESI resources are endlessly proclaimed to be put in finally ironing that port (next release for real), I tend to get little annoyed by any arguments about that.

 

As much as I'm a fun of Apple products for personal usage, I don't except silent, slick, electric car to be a tank with 800mm gun at front. I reboot for a mother of God...

 

No one will ever know, but if there is a connection between disappearing selected geometry in my view port, problems with selecting components, crashing Houdini after enabling shadows, poor man  ambient occlusion, ghost geometry manifesting itself after deletion and dozens of similar issues hanging around for years now, I might visit Cupertino headquarter at some point. 

[symek]

I must confess using Linux is like making love to a cheese grater…

 

Ha, ha, good one! This is because you come to that grater and try to make love with it while you should errr... simply grate that carrot...

[Guest mantragora]

... I might visit Cupertino headquarter at some point.

[magneto]

After years of listening how bad Houdini works on OSX and how many problems Apples puts upon developers of professional apps on every release of OSX and considering how much work is to be done in OpenGL in Houdini, how far from optimal it is in a platforms Houdini is practically used in productions and how limited SESI resources are endlessly proclaimed to be put in finally ironing that port (next release for real), I tend to get little annoyed by any arguments about that.

 

As much as I'm a fun of Apple products for personal usage, I don't except silent, slick, electric car to be a tank with 800mm gun at front. I reboot for a mother of God...

 

No one will ever know, but if there is a connection between disappearing selected geometry in my view port, problems with selecting components, crashing Houdini after enabling shadows, poor man  ambient occlusion, ghost geometry manifesting itself after deletion and dozens of similar issues hanging around for years now, I might visit Cupertino headquarter at some point. 

 

That's why I also started this thread. Apple seems to give the most problems to developers. Perhaps this is because it's not hammered by millions of developers like Windows where the development experience is a lot better IMO (Visual Studio, etc). But their OS should work better.

 

Also making Mark to lose hair, which is a very important asset for any men

[Guest tar]

It's a little surprising that there's no debug in the OpenGl core profile. 

 

What stops AMD/Nvidia releasing their own up-to-date drivers for OsX? Linux has opensource and proprietary ones. 

[Guest mantragora]

Come on @marty, you can't like my post because you don't know what I did there. You have to be from Poland, born at least in 80's, to understand that joke that is closely tied to Symek's avatar and some child good-night program on television. Maybe some guys from Russian or Czech Republic get it too, but not New Zeland guys.

If you do not recognise this guy



YOU CAN NOT LIKE MY POST!

Edited April 20, 2014 by mantragora

[malexander]

It's a little surprising that there's no debug in the OpenGl core profile. 

 

The debug extension was co-released with OpenGL 4.3. Normally to get access to it you need to request a debug context, and it's possible to get a core-debug context with both the native AMD and Nvidia drivers. It's just another example of Apple lagging a bit in terms of GL features.

 

What stops AMD/Nvidia releasing their own up-to-date drivers for OsX? Linux has opensource and proprietary ones.

 

It's Apple. Perhaps they saw the whole Vista-Nvidia snafu and decided to keep control their GL implementation, as their core drawing libraries are dependent on OpenGL. (Microsoft switched the driver model with Vista, causing all those incompatible hardware issues; initial Nvidia drivers were really unstable and caused a huge percentage of blue-screen issues that marred the Vista launch). Even if you purchase a Quadro K5000 for Mac, which requires you to install Nvidia drivers, you'll still get Apple's OpenGL implementation.

 

No one will ever know, but if there is a connection between disappearing selected geometry in my view port, problems with selecting components, crashing Houdini after enabling shadows, poor man  ambient occlusion, ghost geometry manifesting itself after deletion and dozens of similar issues hanging around for years now, I might visit Cupertino headquarter at some point.

 

I'm not trying to pin all of Houdini's woes on Apple. My post was to compare the current state of OpenGL on OSX to other platforms. OSX's GL issues only affect Houdini on OSX, but there is an indirect effect on the other platforms as well. Supporting GL2.1 and debugging OSX GL issues take away development time from GL3. This is why in the next major Houdini version we've taken the steps to ensure we can use the OpenGL core profile everywhere, so that all platforms can run GL3. I don't expect this to magically fix everything, but it reduces code complexity and size, and that goes a long way towards that goal.

 

Of course, I wouldn't disuade anyone from visting Cupertino, either

[Guest tar]

Come on @marty, you can't like my post because you don't know what I did there. You have to be from Poland, born at least in 80's, to understand that joke that is closely tied to Symek's avatar and some child good-night program on television. Maybe some guys from Russian or Czech Republic get it too, but not New Zeland guys.

If you do not recognise this guy

YOU CAN NOT LIKE MY POST!

 

 

Looks rad. Kozio Pacanow kicks butt! All on YouTube now, no need to be born yesterday 

[jordibares]

The graphics market I think is ripe or change, if Apple weren't so stubborn with their pro support they will certainly get a lot of professional users… anyway… let's see.