protozoan

Can you share some details about your window manager setup? Are you by any chance using wayland with the xwayland-compatibility layer to get X functionality?

You can simply use sops for that.

Put down a grid with 2 rows, 2 columns, scatter some points, stick that into a voronoi fracture, add an enumerate sop, set it to primitives and the attribute name to "index".

Make a copnet, put down a sop import and point it to your grid, stick the output of that into a rasterize geo cop, add an output type ID, and set the name to index.
Done.

Edit: attached a small demo hip.

This may or may not be relevant to the OP's personal situation, but:

We've been using Houdini on Linux for like 15(?) years now, and never had any issues with it other than specific failures like our nvidia driver having certain bugs, or the linux distros going to far ahead of the houdini linux builds. In case of the latter Houdini is probably the software best suited for it, since they often react timely to issues like glibc-incompatibilities with bleeding edge versions.

I find that especially with larger core counts and AMD cpus, the Linux edition performs better.

That said: a lot of videos you see by the developers obviously use some windows laptops, so the difference for a single seat may not warrant a full OS switch, if there's no prior linux experience.

I would nevertheless give it a try.