With the recent growth of Omarchy and the wider adoption of Arch/Hyprland among developers and technical users, I wanted to bring this topic back up from the perspective of professional installations.
I work regularly with TouchDesigner in interactive installations, exhibitions, media servers and systems that may need to run unattended for long periods of time. In that context, Windows is often the part of the system I would most like to remove.
For permanent installations, a lightweight and highly controllable Linux environment is extremely attractive: fewer background processes, predictable updates, easy remote administration, reproducible system images, scripting, automation and generally much tighter control over the machine.
Omarchy is particularly interesting because it is making an Arch + Hyprland environment accessible to a much wider group of users. For the first time in a while, I am seeing developers and creative technologists seriously considering Linux as their everyday workstation, not just as a server OS.
I know that TouchDesigner can already be made to run on Linux through Wine/Proton/Soda, and the recent community work around TouchDesigner-Linux is very encouraging. The fact that people are already successfully running TD on Arch + Hyprland is a great sign.
But for professional deployment, a compatibility layer is still very different from having a native build.
In installation work we often depend on things such as:
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NVIDIA GPUs and hardware decoding
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multiple displays and unusual display configurations
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capture cards
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cameras and depth sensors
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audio interfaces
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NDI and network video
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OSC, MIDI, serial and other I/O
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systems expected to run 24/7 for weeks or months
For this kind of environment, native hardware and driver support matters a lot.
I remember Malcolm explaining previously that the renderer itself is not necessarily the biggest obstacle to Linux support, and that much of the cost comes from windowing, input, audio, I/O and the ongoing maintenance of an additional platform.
That is completely understandable.
But considering how much the Linux desktop ecosystem has evolved, the increasing use of Vulkan, the maturity of NVIDIA drivers on Linux, and the recent interest around Arch/Omarchy-style systems, I am curious whether Derivative’s position has changed at all.
Is a native Linux build of TouchDesigner something that is now being reconsidered internally?
Even if there is no roadmap or commitment, it would be very interesting to know whether Linux is still considered unlikely, or whether it is becoming a realistic possibility in the longer term.
For users building dedicated TouchDesigner machines for installations, a native Linux version would be a very significant development.