Experimental Setup: TouchDesigner on Linux via Bottles
Nice one!
To find the font used anywhere in the UI: move your mouse cursor to that location and press F9. Touchdesigner will open the network used to make that UI (because TouchDesigner is made in….well, TouchDesigner) and with a few clicks there you’ll find the font you’re looking for.
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From what I’ve experienced, (been trying to make touchdesigner work on linux for about 1-2 years now) the 2 black boxes near the timeline and timecode (and also the op menu when you press TAB)
isn’t due to lack of fonts.
There seems to be a box overlayed on top of the text. If you try for yourself, when you write the letter “g” or “p” in lowercase you’ll see the bottom of the character poke out under the box in the search field in the operator menu. I do not know how to approach this to fix the issue, as it seems to be a wine/dxvk rendering bug introduced in the translation layer.
Other than that, some network operators seems to just plain not work or make the program crash.
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Okay, small update on this
I figured out that if I inspect the fields where text wouldn’t display properly and change the “Display Method“ in the inspected field’s “textfield” OP to “Scalable” the text displays properly. Any other method either does not display or just appears to be cut off (bitmap method does this).
This seems to be applicable to any text TOP.
So sadly, I can’t fix this permanently since it’s inside a system tox. But maybe this can give some leads for some more “talented” people (or devs at Derivative) to maybe address this issue. Another thing that may be worth looking into is how DXVK handles this translation.
This is was an awesomely helpful post. Just to share what I found, in case I am able to return the favour: if you go to Dependencies in Bottles and install the “All Windows Fonts” and the “Lucon - Lucid Console Font” from that list, it totally sorts out the fonts on the interface.
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I just put together a little script to go through and change the displaymodes of the TOPS that aren’t working. I made a community post about it but it is still in review.
Here’s my tox file. Turn enable to on to apply the fixes at project startup
wine_ui_fixes.tox (1.2 KB)
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Ohhhhhhh my….
Thank you so much! I knew somehow someday someone would find a way to fix this weird graphical issue.
You’re a lifesaver! I hope this helps a bunch of people like me who just refuses to use Windows anymore.
Cheers 
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Hey !
I wish TD will have a native Linux version one day…
I tried using it inside Bottles on Debian 13. I have very minimal requirements but it worked quite nice.
Now do you use Bottles as a flatpak ? And how well does it play with low level device drivers like Blackmagic capture cards or Kinect ? I think this can be tricky (if even possible) when using flatpak Bottles version, but can it work using native distro package ?
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Thank you all so much! With the help of this thread and the attached UI fix TOX file I just got TD 2025.32050 working on Arch Linux with the flatpak v60 of Bottles.
To anyone else attempting this I found a few things worth mentioning.
I used the soda-9.0-1 Runner with the Application template when creating the new Bottle. It failed to install dxvk-nvapi-v0.9.0 during the Bottle setup, so to fix I had to open Preferences>DLL Components, open the DXVK-NVAPI dropdown and install dxvk-nvapi-v0.7.1 as both of the newer packages would fail.
Once the bottle was setup I had intermittent issues getting the installer to launch with my Wayland/nvidia setup. I used Flatseal to edit the sandbox permissions for Bottles and toggled on GPU acceleration, Input devices, Shared memory, USB devices, Bluetooth, and under the Filesystem section also toggled on All system files, All system libraries, executables and static data, All system configurations, and All user files. I also turned on Settings>Discrete Graphics for the bottle to let it use my nvidia gpu and verified via the textport as it was initially only using the integrated graphics.
I then moved the TD installer into the sandbox before installing by clicking the Browse C:/ drive button once the bottle was created before clicking the Run Executable button.
After install the lucon dependency to install the MS Lucida console font kept failing to download/install until I turned off my VPN even though the allfonts package installed fine with it on. You want to install both of these by clicking on your Bottle and then navigating to Options>Dependencies.
This guide had some helpful details as well:
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thank you. I did this. I installed touchdesigner after the information i found from toritora here, which gave me hope it could work.. Thank you so much…. and then using this TouchDesigner on Linux using Bottles and Wine « Technology, Media and Life in General. , which includes your font instructions. I was so thrilled to find it working. I have 2 issues still: timecode is not displaying at all. I don’t know if the numbers are there but in black so i can’t see them, or just missing , also if i type to find any top, chop, sop etc.. the text is not properly visible. Does anyone have any idea of how i could fix this please ? Thank you so much . here’s a screenshot showing lack of timecode and what looks like the parts of letters in my search dialog for a top
Hey there,
Take a look at this and see if it works for you:
https://derivative.ca/community-post/asset/minor-ui-fixes-touchdesigner-wine/73421
I made a component that you can install into your projects that specifically fixes this.
If it still does not work make sure you have the “Verdana” font installed in your bottle.
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C0deous, thanks so much, that’s really great. magic… Now i have timecode etc and see what i type. (I tried to like your comment, but for some reason when i try and like comments i get redirected to the welcome forum page, ).
oh, okay liking it worked after i replied, weird
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Hey everyone, first of all thanks for the great work that made this possible!
Has anyone tried to create an Anaconda environment inside TD’s bottle to import external Python modules? I have been trying for a couple hours but I can’t get bottled Touchdesigner to recognize my modules. Maybe it’s asking too much for an emulated version but was curious to know if someone had succeeded in this.
Probably easiest to use the recently added TDPyEnvManager for this
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Thanks for the tip! I’ll check if it’s compatible with older TD versions (I’m using 2023.11290 for licensing reasons)
just want to add to this thread some thoughts. I don’t think debian is the best distro for these purposes, its dependency hell and weird nvidia compatibility issues kept me from using td at medium potential . Arch linux is significantly better since installations are typically minimalistic, and nvidia support is quite good.
i also want to add that TD should get a linux native version, linux will soon be better for these kinds of production environments since the user has a lot more control than with windows, computational resources are used more efficiently, boot times are faster, and its way more powerful in aspects like cybersecurity, networks, etc.
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Anyone have any luck getting Touch to work under Proton 10 (GE or non)? It works well under Proton 9 GE, and there’s a Spout2 extension available for Proton now, but it requires Proton 10+ features. Touch hangs when loading NewProject.toe under Proton 10.
Update on this! I got the latest TouchDesigner build working on Linux, CachyOS, though this should work on any distribution as it only relies on Proton 10+ and the Spout2PW tools. I’ve published the setup here: Running TouchDesigner on Proton 10 (Linux) — fix for mimalloc/DWrite hang, plus Spout2PW setup · GitHub
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I’m able to run TD on Arch on my windows projects without any noticeable issues with the provided steps, machine is purring. I’m also able to use TDBitwig out of the box –Bitwig and TD started talking to each other without a single glitch.