Quite true.
I was talking specifically of those people who have chosen to remain on the desktop and are willing to pay for Apple hardware.
(Designers film editors etc)
Their graphics processors are going to be upgraded for the foreseeable future, unlike those people who were depending on the NVIDIA who seems to be largely abandoning the desktop market in favor of enterprise AI solutions.
For me, personally, the state of the desktop market is largely moot.
My son is a career law enforcement officer ,He turns 30 in October 2026, heās married, owns his own home.
and has his first child on the way in april
( my third grandchild. )
He was considering buying himself a nice gaming PC a year and a half ago ,before all of this Ram and GPU pricing madness started, but he chose to buy himself an oled steam deck instead and recently got the switch 2 mobile gaming device as well for his gaming.
None of his contemporaries ,in his age, demographic, are even considering desktop PCās at this point because most of them are using AI for any visually creative work that theyāre doing.
And as we both know, you donāt need a powerful PC to just go onto the internet. and work with your preferred AI system unless you plan on running some local AI Model Which appears to be a minority sub demographic of the AI user base at this point.
Linux is a way to liberate yourself from it, albeit not without caveats,
But sadly, that liberation often comes at an extraordinarily high price that most people arenāt willing to pay.
And that is the abandonment of certain software packages that we have been using for years( in some cases, decades) and not having ,what we subjectively consider, a viable alternative to replace them.
And lobbying the makers of your favorite software package to create a Linux version has not been a very successful strategy from what Iāve observed over the years.
yet, we should never lose faith and at the very least speak up. Iām glad I spoke up when iclone was a closed asset system, Reallusion has been able to remain competitive in the game dev world from it. itās always been in their and the communityās best interest. Iāll still have windows 10 to work with in this pc either way.
Thanks Job,
My two grandsons(ages 2 & 5 via my Daughter), will soon have a little female cousin to play with.
I have six PCs in my room. Oh, and a laptop. Of course, I only use a few at the time.
I have 5 computers although only three of them are actually being actively used at the moment.
My 2 old laptops,( both windows ) are put away in a closet somewhere.
My newest desktop machine( Dell Inspiron) ,purchased back during the pandemic, is running itās original factory install of windows 10 that has never been updated because I disabled updates right after buying the machine.
(this is where I have Blender, Iclone,CC ,My Adobe suite,Davinci Comiclife, Cartoon animator etc)
My internet computer is a 15-year-old Imac that was given to me free .
I have an old HP All-in-one PC that originally came with Windows 8. (Another free gift from a neighbor)
I wiped the 350 GB HD and installed Linux mint.
It is really is a smooth operating system to work with, even on this really old outdated hardware.
Hereās the desktop ,
I find it somewhat ironic, that for all the passionate Linux advocacy going on here, I seem to be the only one in this thread actively using the linux OS on a daily basis, (even if only for entertainment purposes).
Five computers, six computers and some people posted screenshots of their space cluttered with computers and monitors.
How that? Are you all rich and something? The energy bill alone would end me.
I always used to have only one computer at the time.
Used PCās and laptops can be had for very cheap on eBay and other online market places.
And here in the New York tri-state area ,where I live, there are plenty of electronics " thrift" stores that sell used machines for next to nothing.
You donāt need to be ārichā and buy multiple top end machines with a massive NVIDIA GPUās for them to be useful.
You can have one main machine that you use for your major creative work and keep disconnected from the internet.
and at least one second used machine or laptop that you can perhaps experiment with where it wouldnāt be a life-changing disaster if you had to wipe it because of a bad windows, update or you decided to try a linux Distro.
And quite frankly many of the people I see in certain communities crying about the rising cost of hardware, also boast about having over a $$terabyte of Daz content$$ that theyāve hoarded over the years, sitting largely unused.
And then add to that the fact that Daz
, for example, has tied itself to an outdated brute force path tracing engine from NVIDIA( with NO RTX support BTW) Thatās forcing its users to buy expensive GPU hardware with the same specifications as workstations used by industry professionals running Autodesk Maya and sideFX Houdini .
As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating! Like I mentioned, I would be interested to know what Proton can actually do. That it can run games doesnāt tell me much.
Well, to be frank, there is a big difference between āambitionā and just endless, idle talking and complaining about what you wish would happen.
when ambitious people who are presented with real world, practical, existing solutions, ( duo boot, migrate to Blender second hand used machine to experiment with Linux installs., etc)
I would think they would ,at a minimum, implement some of the actual steps towards their stated goals.
To just ignore them and go back and repeating the same complaints, well, thatās not really āambitionā IMHO, that seems more like merely complaining that the world around you will not completely reorient itself to accommodate your needs instead of you adjusting your āambitionsā to the reality of the world as it exists today.
Iāve been away from the thread because of work and yesterday I was working on a very fun creative project - but Iāve been dipping into AI this weekend, and will continue to do more today. To summarize what has already been summarized, I can NOT run Linux on my PC at this point AND run Reallusion and there are no current solutions for that other than a dual boot setup. But the PC market is so abysmally bad (and getting worse by the day), that itāll be a while before I even entertain buying a new PCā¦if itās even necessary. Because in just the few short months Iāve been away from AI, it can now do what it couldnāt before. The progress has been remarkable. AI might make Reallusion obsolete. I truly enjoy the work that goes into character creation. I love all the little details I can changeā¦but what I love most of all is I DONāT need to be online to do it. I have created many characters that no one will ever see, and I like that. Our privacy has really become a thing of the past, which is sad. But outside of that, I donāt see why AI canāt entirely replace everything Reallusion does. And, as has been pointed out, you just need access to the internet for that. I am very old school and I canāt see myself leaving Reallusion. I want to know that I own everything I make (I can create a character, store that project on a hard drive and never have to worry about it). I mean I started writing with a pencil on notebook paper, filling up composition journals. I used a word processor my freshman year in college. I said all that to say AI might make the entire move to Linux an invalid point if Reallusion canāt prevent themselves from being replaced entirely by AI - which I (personally) would hate to see - but Reallusion might go extinct just like the word processor did (let me just add the word processor was also super niche and I had a PC by my sophomore year). On a positive note, if they can somehow (and I have no idea how they would do this) tweak their AI plugin to be better, so that it can seamlessly be used with other AI programs - they could be golden. Theyāre working on it, but the backdoor software stuff that needs to happen for that to be a reality is probably prohibitively expensive. And they would need to offer something exclusive to Reallusion to justify the premium for owning their software as opposed to just using several AI subscriptions. Itās going to be a real challenge and I donāt envy them. But, in the meantime, turning off all Windows 11 updates solves the Windows problems.
To have sufficient control when generating videos in AI, it helps to have a start frame and an end frame. That is where I use iClone for at the moment. I create the environment (which I like to do) in iClone, render an image that will be the start or end frame, and then use AI to render that into the stylized look Iām after. I also design my own characters with CC, another thing that I like to do.
It is a good workflow I think, because image references work better that pure text references. You could easily replicate that under Linux if you have a way to create environments and characters.
I also like to do the scenes in IClone after creating the characters. And, yes, I do use those images as references. Right now, in fact, Iām about to try to use AI to take an IClone scene (that I really couldnāt properly do IClone) and make it into the scene I want. This will be my first true test in a long time, is this a scene thatās pivotal to the story. And since Iām ONLY doing still images at this point, Iām optimistic.
When you look at the current prefabricated character ecosystems of softwares such as Reallusion, Daz even poser, theyāre all based on the paradigm of you purchasing characters and content and then storing them locally on your hard drive and reusing them a variety of scenes and situations.
As of 2026, this paradigm has been completely duplicated by AI.
I spent most of this weekend prototyping characters for my next graphic novel and the accompanying short animations Iām going to use to promote it.
I Already have multiple saved character designs. on my hard drive ( and in my saved library at Mage.space)
I can reuse my characters over and over in various prompted scenes for still graphic novel art as well as animations.
Sure in my case, my preference is for 2D. animation, but you could do the same thing with 3D characters that youāve developed with AI.
Itās just a matter of finding an AI service that will allow you to reuse the same characters and it will reproduce them with absolute fidelity in different environments and situations.
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