Finally got a day off, with the leisure time to install Linux. Been booting off the USB for days now. During the 'trial' period, I tried out a number of different distros, just to refresh my head on what's out there. I used to be a big Ubuntu fan. Debian-based distros are by far my favorite (long familiarity, most likely). But I didn't really like the new desktop environment in Ubuntu. Unity Desktop it's called, I believe. I had the issue that the taskbar buttons are lined up along the left edge of the screen, and the taskbar is 'sticky', meaning that it makes the mouse pointer stick to it slightly. This causes a hesitation as the mouse crosses from one monitor to the other, and after a mere handful of hours this behavior started to infuriate me beyond what most people would find reasonable. I hated it so bad, just thinking about it makes my hands shake. It's the little things...

I ended up installing Mint. It's Debian-based, had a very easy install with no bugs or glitches. I'm starting to really like the Cinnamon desktop environment. Got my development setup all put together, installed the Radeon drivers, got Urho3D building, got my game building and running, got Blender going, even got that Instant Meshes re-topo tool I talked about working, etc... Everything seems to be mostly hunky-dory (absent an issue with GC that I am working on debugging, specifically with the quad-planar shader I talked about a couple posts back).

I really love how developer-friendly Linux is. It's something I've missed, having been back on Windows for so long. With the package-based software system of Debian, it's extremely easy to download and install all the various developer packages that I love to use.

An added bonus is that my game achieves essentially the same performance as on Windows/D3D11. It's not fantastic; a solid 18 or so fps. But it'll do.