How to Install Blender 2.78 in Ubuntu 16.04, 14.04

Last updated: June 9, 2021

Blender 2.78

The Blender Foundation has recently announced the release of Blender 2.78. Here’s how to install or upgrade it via PPA in Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 14.04, and Linux Mint 18, 17.

What’s new in Blender 2.78:

  • spherical stereo rendering support for VR
  • a grease pencil for full 2D drawing and animations
  • viewport rendering improvements
  • freehand curves drawing over surfaces
  • bendy bones support
  • alembic support
  • The Cycles Render Engine has NVIDIA Pascal support
  • new physics capabilities, and various new add-ons.

Install/upgrade to Blender 2.78 via PPA:

Thomas Schiex is maintaining a PPA with most recent Blender release for Ubuntu 16.10, Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 14.04, and Linux Mint 17, 18.

So you can easily install Blender 2.78 or upgrade from a previous release by following the steps below:

1. Open terminal from Unity Dash, App Launcher, or via Ctrl+Alt+T keys. When it opens, run command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:thomas-schiex/blender

2. To upgrade from a previous release, simply launch Software Updater and install the updates after checking for updates:

Or install Blender for the first time or upgrade Blender via command:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install blender

3. (Optional) To restore to the stock version of Blender in Ubuntu’s main repository, purge the ppa via command:

sudo apt install ppa-purge && sudo ppa-purge ppa:thomas-schiex/blender

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I'm a freelance blogger who started using Ubuntu in 2007 and wishes to share my experiences and some useful tips with Ubuntu beginners and lovers. Please comment to let me know if the tutorial is outdated! And, notify me if you find any typo/grammar/language mistakes. English is not my native language. Contact me via ubuntuhandbook1@gmail.com Buy me a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/ubuntuhandbook1

3 responses to How to Install Blender 2.78 in Ubuntu 16.04, 14.04

  1. Debian packages are better when you have no internet

  2. Hi, Ji.
    English is not my native language. So I apologize for any mistake I could make writing this comment. As you are using Blender for a while, I’d want to know if you have had problems in installing and running Blender. I’m using Blender 2.76 right now and don’t want to upgrade to newer versions because these don’t render when using my Graphic Card and Cuda. The program crashes. Until the version 2.76 I haven’t had any problem with that. I’ve tried to find any solution in Internet but not good it resulted. I’m a Ubuntu 16.04 user. If you have an idea to help me to solve this problem, please, tell me.

    • Not sure if it’s actually still an issue but for a while you first had to run Blender at least once as root in order to be able to enable gpu rendering support.