Linux...anybody using it?

[jeffh]

I still really dont get why people bother with linux, aprt from the novelty factor and just to see aspect.

Why make things so difficult ?

I have no problem admitting that it used to be quite difficult years ago, but now Ubuntu is easy enough for Grandma to use, I've given it to girlfriends and the elderly alike, and they all loved it...

urlwolf's problems are more of the exception than the rule now, but it's not like every Windows user is guaranteed of having a trouble-free experience either...

[stanlea]

True. We use Linux on all computers at home, and have no problems. Lately I had to fix a problem on a windows machine and it reminded how it's not more simple than linux when you have a problem. This said, audio on Linux is mainly tricky because of bad support from hardware manufacturers. Better alsa drivers should help a lot.

[pc999]

I still really dont get why people bother with linux, aprt from the novelty factor and just to see aspect.

Why make things so difficult ?

It is not novelty, I really find it to be a better OS because of:

1- The whole interface is better for working, specially with workspaces for multi tasking

2- It can take much more punishment before the CPU/RAM show it is limits

3- More stable, I have done video editing+ HEAVY web browsing/research +gimp editing + ... on a PC where I barely could do lighter video editing alone in W7.

4- No hassle with copy protections

5- most of your software keep up to date


And you can also factor some novelty factor, once you can have 5+ desktop environments a log in way, it is like changing to a different PC in 30s.


At the end it isnt really harder, if you try Renoise or EnergyXT (which have a native linux versions) it is equal to PC, it just use 1/4 less of CPU (in my dual core) but it is exactly the same.

In same cases it is even easier because it bring much more stuff packed in including codecs and better apps.

I actually had less problems with Linux than with Windows in that last 2 years.

[wasi]

I feel Linux, except maybe Ubuntu but it's been two versions since I tried it, kind of falls short as a consumer OS on the small stuff. I have a netbook that did fine with Win7 light or whatever the heck that was called, and I've installed literally a dozen distros on it. It's awesome how you can get everything to work eventually, no matter what is broken, but not one of them worked 100% right out of the box. Volume keys, backlight control, built in stereo mics that only work when you disable one of them. Every distro had some little quirk or problem that needed elaborate hacking to get to work. Utter insanity.

And you never know ahead of time. WLAN chipset? Graphics card? Motherboard somethingorother bridge-linker whatsumacallit controller? USB controller chipset? Suddenly you're researching stuff you never even knew mattered made by manufacturers you thought went out of business in your teens and entering obscure commands at a command prompt. Then, at one-thirty in the moring it suddenly works and you wonder what did the trick.

But I love Linux. And I think Valve is right: With Apple and Microsoft drawing up more and more fences around their systems, we will see a second coming of Linux. Ubuntu is probably already 98% there as far usability, compared to Windows or OSX.

What I love is using Renoise as its own window manager. Running an OS consisting only of your DAW it just so awesome.

[jeffh]

I feel Linux, except maybe Ubuntu but it's been two versions since I tried it, kind of falls short as a consumer OS on the small stuff. I have a netbook that did fine with Win7 light or whatever the heck that was called, and I've installed literally a dozen distros on it. It's awesome how you can get everything to work eventually, no matter what is broken, but not one of them worked 100% right out of the box. Volume keys, backlight control, built in stereo mics that only work when you disable one of them. Every distro had some little quirk or problem that needed elaborate hacking to get to work. Utter insanity.

You're right, Ubuntu is the only distro that "just works". There's plenty of reasons to hate Canonical, but all of the other distros fall short of being ready for the average consumer to use.

And you never know ahead of time. WLAN chipset? Graphics card? Motherboard somethingorother bridge-linker whatsumacallit controller? USB controller chipset? Suddenly you're researching stuff you never even knew mattered made by manufacturers you thought went out of business in your teens and entering obscure commands at a command prompt. Then, at one-thirty in the moring it suddenly works and you wonder what did the trick.

Laptops are a mess anyways because every vendor saw it fit to use their own unique, special ACPI quirks for every single laptop... Your problems are in the kernel, so pretty much every distro is going to have those same problems(unless it was fixed in a newer kernel revision then old-kernel-distros like Debian won't get the fix for like 5 years).

But desktops generally have predictable Linux performance as long as you researched the motherboard first, and as far as laptops... How I do it is, I go into Best Buy with a Ubuntu live CD, and tell the salesperson "look, if I can boot this laptop into Ubuntu and everything works, I'm buying it. You don't have to give me permission to, but if you could just look the other way and pretend you don't know what I'm doing, that would be great, thanks..."

Then of course, I post the obligatory "it works with Ubuntu" review on BestBuy.com, and receive millions of "thumbs up" on my post

[wasi]

How I do it is, I go into Best Buy with a Ubuntu live CD, and tell the salesperson "look, if I can boot this laptop into Ubuntu and everything works, I'm buying it. You don't have to give me permission to, but if you could just look the other way and pretend you don't know what I'm doing, that would be great, thanks..."

lol, trust is a wonderful thing.

Crungbang did very well too as far as working out of the box. Even two finger scrolling worked right off on my eeePC, which I never got to work with Ubuntu. Also, after the tenth iteration of changing acpi_osi=linux and acpi_backlight=vendor in grub you kind of just get it over with.

[pc999]

You're right, Ubuntu is the only distro that "just works". There's plenty of reasons to hate Canonical, but all of the other distros fall short of being ready for the average consumer to use.

Linux Mint is very, very good too!

Maybe I am lucky but from a about year ago all the Ubuntu/Mint seems to just work for must things, more than Windows actually tested on 2 desktops and even the old netbook I have.

I am still have trouble with stuff like Steam games (some of them, ironically, only the valve ones) on 12.10 (which released first) but I prefer to just wait for 13.04 to get all the latest stuff including AMD drivers....

Anyway that should get even better if they are going for a rolling release.

[glokraw]

True. We use Linux on all computers at home, and have no problems. Lately I had to fix a problem on a windows machine and it reminded how it's not more simple than linux when you have a problem. This said, audio on Linux is mainly tricky because of bad support from hardware manufacturers. Better alsa drivers should help a lot.

It's not bad support. It's nonexistant. The hardware makers had nothing to do
with the plethora of linux sound systems, vying for acceptance.

Problems are competition among distro-maintainers, outweighing
distro stability, insider disagreements on standards,
rapid kernel deployment, the whole pulse Vs the world thing, absurd
permissions issues piled upon multiple versions/releases of jackd...
hey, now I'm writing like Jeff does

The hardware makers are not NPO's.
Show them the money, and there will be support. Still, a few companies
have opened up rudimentary docs over the years, or loaned/donated
hardware to allow unfunded work to be done by the alsa team.

This site exists largely because commercially funded support is so bad.
You can always get your Jaguar converted into a lawnmower,
if you show somebody the money.

That being said, I would much rather help a novice with linux,
than windows. And against the odds, people are making movies and
art, and music with linux, and quite happily. The biggest issue I have
with linux, is the lack of freely downloadable accurate synapses.

[jeffh]

hey, now I'm writing like Jeff does

YES!!! I've finally gotten through to glokraw!

[glokraw]

must not buy Cubase
must not buy Cubase
must not buy Cubase
must
not

[urlwolf]

To top it off, I have 32ms latency. With a monster DAC, the music streamer II.

Some important things to consider before jumping into a linux DAW:

- You will probably spend more time in IRC and forums than on making music (in my experience)

- There are zero docs, nor tutorials. Any of the big names have good docs, books written on every aspect, youtube videos... good luck on any linux synth or daw. You are lucky if you get presets

- even if you find someone with a solution for your setup, it might well be outdated or plain wrong. Getting the grain from the shaft gets tiring...

- Lots of good vsts out there for free if you are on win or mac, close to zero if you are on linux.


In general, if you don't want problems, stay mainstream.

I got my 5yo laptop with windows out of the closet. Set up studio one. I'm already making music, with less latency than in my MONSTER rig with ubuntu 12.10 + kxstudio. It took 1/100th the time.

I feel so sorry it even crossed my mind to use linux as a daw...

[jeffh]

I'm sorry you feel like you wasted your time urlwolf. FWIW, I pretty much agree with your assessment. I suggested that those exact problems you listed needed to be addressed on linuxmusicians.com (which is mostly populated with Linux audio developers) and was called a troll.

I also suggested that your experience was that of the average Windows user trying to cross over to Linux: They try it, they either have loads of problems, or are just thoroughly unimpressed by the overall quality of the experience compared to Windows(especially the Jack-centric workflow and it's shortcomings).

This is exactly why linuxmusicians.com has over 3000 registered users, and only about 30 semi-regular posters, 25 of whom are developers, and 5 normal-ish users. That number of registered users represents the 99.9999% of people just like you who made a serious attempt to try Linux audio and go right back to Windows.

This is also exactly what my project is trying to address, and why it doesn't bother to try to play nicely with the rest of the Linux audio ecosystem. First I tried to play community organizer, but none of the other developers would even acknowledge these problems, let alone make a commitment to fixing them. My project is still very young, but continuing to grow quickly (I've already got another imminent release that will be another huge step forward), but I think the turning point will be when I have a proper ALSA back-end and no longer have to deal with the bugs associated with Jack, which continue to be the #1 problem child for most normal users...

Although I have noticed that AV Linux recently has a stated policy of moving away from Jack standalone apps and towards plugins only... I seem to recall the owner of that distro calling me a troll for suggesting that plugins/hosts were a better way to do things than Jack, and I'm quite sure he's not going to credit me for the idea, even after all of the nasty things he said to me

[codec_spurt]

I've got an old laptop that I put a Debian expert install onto. Took a bit of work, but because of its ancientness, it needed something lean and mean. Latest versions of Mint would overload it.

I eventually got it working, settling for the XFCE desktop instead of LXDE, even though it was supposed to be more resource hungry, I found the complete opposite.

But it still was unusable. I asked on the forums and everyone said with my spec it should be reasonable, but it is actually unusable. I have a theory that it is my Celeron chip which is 'optimised' for winxp, but the experts tell me that is not the case. Oh well, it's ten years old, I'm surprised it still works at all.

I just want to listen to a bit of music and surf a bit, but no luck. It's very intensive trying to get answers to problems on the forums, and the Debian one is one of the most brutal I have come across. Not personally, but I have seen some psychopathic attacks on people that were totally unwarranted. I guess a lot of Debian experts are not right in the head.

The Mint forums aren't much better. Of course I read the FM. But so much is just not covered. I recently changed something in a config file to reset the brightness of my monitor by default. Long story short: the system would not boot and the alternative that I could boot into required a password. Now, I use the same one for everything Minty just to keep things simple, but for some reason it would not let me in. I guess I must have used a different one, but I am 99 percent certain that I didn't. This particular install is like six months of hard graft on and off, and my backup didn't seem to be working.

Desperate times. I ask on the Mint forums for a solution and I get very few replies, mostly pointing me to the dozens of threads on the subject that I had researched but to no avail. The best one was - start again and re-install it all from scratch! Thanks for that. I know that someone could have helped a brother out, but hey, it's not easy being a guru, gotta keep on guruing and don't sweat the small stuff.

Me? I had the last laugh. I managed to re-install a perfect carbon copy clone of my install from the backup that I was having problems with. I save any files I want to keep to a Linux folder on my laptop hd. Works for me. I don't trust USB sticks or SD cards. Also I don't know what I am doing and occasionally make stupid mistakes like the aforementioned one. I know some clever people that can just install what ever distro they want over the top of their current install and have all their documents and stuff ready in the same place just by doing the /home directory bit at install time. Haven't got a clue how they do it. Anyway, my files are where I want them, so same effect.

Nobody from the Linux community can ever say to me: Oh we really help people, we are a really great community that helps people out. I've never had help. But that's ok, that's how I learn. Glokraw covered a lot of the points of why Linux will not replace windows on the desktop any time soon. It is one massive missed opportunity. Sure you can get help if you are working on the Kernel and you can get to feel l337 and all warm and fluffy inside. Others can go take a jump.

I love Linux. But others don't seem so interested. They know windows and don't want anything else. Not everyone I know, I do help some people out with it, but far too many just want the familiar. When all you want to do is some word processing or surfing the net, then Linux Mint is more than stable enough and more than functional enough. It has sheer beauty in its interface that takes the Mac paradigm and extends it ten fold. I love to use Linux for just surfing and listening to music/lectures. Also I find myself doing a lot of graphics on it, because I have fallen in love with InkScape. Blender still scares me though and I have other programs on windows for that stuff anyway.


Phew, glad I got that off my chest.

I suppose the point I am trying to make is, Linux is great for most people most the time for most stuff, but when you run into problems, you just can't get help. And ONE of the most glaring f***ups on the whole Linux subject is its AUDIO DRIVERS. It IS a nightmare. Sure most the time it works straight outta the box. But then when it stops working, what do you do? RTFM. Sure, not in the manual for a start. When you consider the great minds behind this community effort, they could sort it if they wanted, but their motives are their motives, who are we to question them?

Anyway.


I'm really looking forward to having just one basic DAW up and running in a Linux environment. Still haven't got around to installing yours jeffh, but don't take it personally, I still haven't had time to install EnergyXT2 yet. I'm going to have to do that, because I am really curious as to how it works compared to windows. I'd be really happy with that, PyDaw and eXT2 and Audacity. What more could a muso ask for? But this is long term stuff for me and it will happen.
And you can be sure I'll share and add to the common pool of knowledge, for all those poor, pitiful, dumb and lazy noobs.

Which we all were at one time or another.

Just some random musings and findings on the subject of Linux on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Feel free to ignore and carry on.

But this is a great thread with a very broad cross section of people contributing to it, advanced, beginner, intermediate alike. Devs, users of Linux in general and users of Linux audio software in specific. You don't really get anything like this on the Linux forums, and now it seems we have a 'champion' who is taking the whole audio on Linux subject seriously and tackling it head on, with all the headaches that will incur too of course, but asking the hard to answer questions none the less.

This could be the start of something truly beautiful.

Now, where'd I put me usb stick?


cheers.


Edit:
Btw, forgot to mention that that piece of bloated junk that is windows 7 keeps hanging and crashing on me. I have to cold re-boot by powering off. I don't have a clue how to fix it. It just comes and gos. Guess I could start again and re-install windows or do some serious debugging. I have kept it in absolutely immaculate condition but still get this ****. At least I'm not the only one...

[codec_spurt]

You're right, Ubuntu is the only distro that "just works". There's plenty of reasons to hate Canonical, but all of the other distros fall short of being ready for the average consumer to use.

Linux Mint is very, very good too!

Linux Mint is superb. Not for no reason is it the no.1 distro at distrowatch. And most tech-heads I talk to use it, if they don't use Debian. Then again there is a Debian version of it, even though it is based heavily on Ubuntu with a bit of Debian thrown in. Confusing.

The main advantage to Mint and why it overtook Ubuntu vanilla is because of the Gnome 3 debacle. I've used every single desktop with Mint and love them all. No reason as well, why you can't install ALL of the desktops and select which one you want at boot time. Some programs may work better with a certain desktop environment, but if you can take the time and make the effort, there's no reason why you can't have the best of all possible worlds. In theory.

Mint might not work well on VERY old computers, but it plays a blinder on moderately old computers. But I suspect jeffh probably would have included Mint in his comments, but just forgot to qualify that, because, obviously for the most part, Mint IS 90 percent Ubuntu at heart. Their desktop environments being the most fundamental place where they diverge.


cheers.

[jeffh]

Nobody from the Linux community can ever say to me: Oh we really help people, we are a really great community that helps people out. I've never had help.

There are pockets of helpfulness... but yeah, the minute you tell somebody that something sucks compared to Windows, they take it so personally

Glokraw covered a lot of the points of why Linux will not replace windows on the desktop any time soon. It is one massive missed opportunity. Sure you can get help if you are working on the Kernel and you can get to feel l337 and all warm and fluffy inside. Others can go take a jump.

Ubuntu has ambitious plans not to miss that desktop opportunity. ie: Creating their own display server because X11 always sucked and Wayland is like 6 years away from being finished(after 5 years of development already), and supporting DRM, ie: DVDs, video/music will actually play back properly now in Linux and so on... and the L337 crowd(all 50 of them) are up in arms and vowing to destroy Canonical over these heinous crimes against Linux...

I suppose the point I am trying to make is, Linux is great for most people most the time for most stuff, but when you run into problems, you just can't get help. And ONE of the most glaring f***ups on the whole Linux subject is its AUDIO DRIVERS. It IS a nightmare. Sure most the time it works straight outta the box. But then when it stops working, what do you do? RTFM. Sure, not in the manual for a start. When you consider the great minds behind this community effort, they could sort it if they wanted, but their motives are their motives, who are we to question them?

Often everything just works... but if it doesn't, you're pretty much screwed... If my best efforts to research my purchase ahead of time still fail, I sell the offending piece of hardware on Craigslist and try something else, but others don't have the luxury of being able to afford to take a loss on something like that... It seems that I collect audio interfaces and MIDI controllers(and speakers), because I have quite a few just laying around not even hooked up to a computer...