What is the recommended Platform for PsychoPy

What Operating System does the PsychoPy development team use?

I’ve been trying for weeks to get PsychoPy working on Ubuntu 22.04.1LTS. I’ve followed the various guides, tried a clean install and chased down several problems. It sort of works, but is unstable, hangs and does not run experiments that work on Ubuntu 18.04.

18.04 is near end of life. We need to move our stimulus computers to an OS that is active support.

I’ve had a similar experience with 22.04. I’ve also noticed that contrary to my expectations, Psychopy seems to have better timing performance on Windows 10 than on Linux. I’m thinking its probably best to switch away from Linux for Psychopy (but maybe keep dual boot for when we need Psychtoolbox) as soon as the opportunity arises.

We do most of our dev on Windows. In my experience you can get decent timing (but always check your own timing) and it’s just easier. While Mario has a point that there is an advantage in principle to using linux, because the people are in control and we can see/change things we don’t like, in my experience Windows is currently fine. That said, we certainly are keen to improve the situation for installing on Linux, and if the situation on Windows ever gets worse (e.g. like on MacOS where there’s a mandatory 1-frame delay that can’t be turned off) then we’ll make improving Linux our absolute #1 priority

Regarding your actual issue, I don’t think the version of Ubuntu is a particularly big deal. But the version of Python certainly is - you really need Python 3.8 or 3.9. Python 3.10 on Linux has some issues with wxPython which is needed for the app to run. Now, the issue with more recent Ubuntu distributions is that they provide/expect Py3.10 and getting Python 3.8/3.9 installed has a couple of steps.

See this thread for a discussion of the install process on Ubuntu 22.14 and 22.04:

I had managed to install Psychopy 2021.x version on my Linux Mint machine by reading the various guides in this forum. It was working ok but certainly far from being ideal.

But when I tried to update it to the newest version a couple of days ago things went downhill and while playing with ALTERNATIVES and removing “obsolete” python versions I bricked my machine. I guess we have all been there :smiley:

Having said that it would be great if the dev team could consider providing a bit more support for Linux - the are certainly many topics on this matter as of recently. But I fully understand there are very limited resources and other things must take priority. I wish my skills/knowledge were such so I can contribute but I am afraid I will again… brick things.

Best wishes
Yiannis

Hi @Yiannis

I’ve recently updated this tutorial.

I hope it helps :slight_smile:

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