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Pixinsight on Fedora with Gnome? / Choosing CPU

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9 replies to this topic

#1 Whereisclearsky

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Posted 04 May 2025 - 03:45 PM

Hi,

 

I'm using Mac as a daily PC, but I think about building a small PC with powerful CPU and a lot of RAM, no GPU, to be used only for Pixinsight.

 

Is it possible to run PI on Fedora easily?

Have anyone tested it on GNOME if it works fine without any bugs?

 

As for CPU I'm thinking about AMD Ryzen 9 9950X 4.3 GHz 16-Core Processor​



#2 Jim Waters

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Posted 04 May 2025 - 03:58 PM

"The recommended and reference implementation of PixInsight for Linux is the Kubuntu Linux build. It's the platform where PixInsight developers prioritize testing and performance optimization. Currently, the supported distributions for PixInsight 1.9.3 are Kubuntu Linux 24.04 LTS and Kubuntu Linux 22.04 LTS."

 

I haven't tried Fedora.  You should ask the developers.

 

You will regret not having a NVIDIA GPU.


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#3 Whereisclearsky

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Posted 04 May 2025 - 03:59 PM

"The recommended and reference implementation of PixInsight for Linux is the Kubuntu Linux build. It's the platform where PixInsight developers prioritize testing and performance optimization. Currently, the supported distributions for PixInsight 1.9.3 are Kubuntu Linux 24.04 LTS and Kubuntu Linux 22.04 LTS."

 

I haven't tried Fedora.  You should ask the developers.

 

You will regret not having a NVIDIA GPU.

I don't like anything Ubuntu related same with KDE, just asking here as probably someone is already using Fedora I guess.



#4 hyiger

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Posted 04 May 2025 - 05:13 PM

Hi,

 

I'm using Mac as a daily PC, but I think about building a small PC with powerful CPU and a lot of RAM, no GPU, to be used only for Pixinsight.

 

Is it possible to run PI on Fedora easily?

Have anyone tested it on GNOME if it works fine without any bugs?

 

As for CPU I'm thinking about AMD Ryzen 9 9950X 4.3 GHz 16-Core Processor​

I would avoid building a PC for PixInsight without a decent GPU unless you are budget constrained. 



#5 Whereisclearsky

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Posted 04 May 2025 - 05:14 PM

I think I will just upgrade my Mac to M4 Pro.



#6 hyiger

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Posted 04 May 2025 - 05:21 PM

I think I will just upgrade my Mac to M4 Pro.

On my M4 Max MBP I stack with AstroPixelProcessor which is native Apple Silicon and 6-7x faster than PixInsight WBPP. Then I use PixInsight for the post processing. 


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#7 Whereisclearsky

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Posted 04 May 2025 - 05:22 PM

On my M4 Max MBP I stack with AstroPixelProcessor which is native Apple Silicon and 6-7x faster than PixInsight WBPP. Then I use PixInsight for the post processing. 

I've tried it but I prefer WBPP tbh.

And from what I understand PI will be available for ARM in the future, so it should be much faster.



#8 const

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Posted 04 May 2025 - 05:26 PM

I use PI on my PC running Gentoo and KDE. No problems. PI has some complex UI, so KDE is what's important. It may have some quirks and bugs on other window managers. I tried it on plain Ubuntu with Wayland, last time a few months ago. It just didn't show any UI at all, useless. To be safe, I'd anticipate using KDE on any distro.
GPU is only useful for a handful of processes, none of which are in the base package. I don't have Nvidia GPU, so Russ's *XT things run slow for me, but that's fine. I have a discrete AMD GPU which is plenty enough to render the UI and images of course.
One day they may start utilizing GPU for more first party processes, but that day hasn't come yet. Weigh your risks.
Make sure you don't skimp on fast storage for scratch space and plenty of RAM. After that, the more CPU power the better.
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#9 nou

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Posted 05 May 2025 - 05:22 AM

People are always telling in topics like this "Oh you definitely need GPU for PixInsight" like it is the most important part. Like base Pix doesn't use  GPU for anything else than drawing windows. Even integrated GPU will work fine. Only handfull of plugins use GPU acceleration and even them can run on CPU just fine it just take a bit longer.



#10 Whereisclearsky

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Posted 05 May 2025 - 08:52 AM

People are always telling in topics like this "Oh you definitely need GPU for PixInsight" like it is the most important part. Like base Pix doesn't use  GPU for anything else than drawing windows. Even integrated GPU will work fine. Only handfull of plugins use GPU acceleration and even them can run on CPU just fine it just take a bit longer.

I believe only rc-astro plugins are using GPU, and neural engine in case of Macs.




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