Linux Users, What's You Distro Experience?

[revvy]

Thanks gen X

Is that a thing? Love it.

[BertKoor]

tbh, I read there's two fanboys and two people with serious griefs, and a silent majority which just doesn't care.
So it's all in perfect balance.

[audiojunkie]

They hate it, but they can’t leave it alone and walk away. What does that say about them and their purpose for entering every Linux thread that shows up?

[WackyZoundz]

Linux is okay. Just not for anything beyond office tasks. Anything regarding multimedia production is still in the alpha stage. Buggy, unstable and a very poor performance, just like Windows 95 back then. Which explains why you will never find Linux in any studio (including project studios) or in live systems. No professional works with it. Because at the end of the day they need tools which gets the job done. It's a shame that the community wasn't able or willing to solve at least the biggest issues in all those years like including proper drivers for class compliant devices.

The only distro I see which could have a future is SteamOS. DAW and plugin developers should focus on this one and forget the rest. Because the rest keeps growing like cancer.

[uOpt]

It's a shame that the community wasn't able or willing to solve at least the biggest issues in all those years like including proper drivers for class compliant devices.

Hm? Which class-compliant USB devices don't work properly?

I am only aware of problems picking up more than 2 channels.

[lunardigs]

tbh, I read there's two fanboys and two people with serious griefs, and a silent majority which just doesn't care.
So it's all in perfect balance.

Who? And what are the serious griefs you've read? If you could reiterate.

Also, how many years have you been using Linux and how's your experience been lately?

[BertKoor]

1. I don't care who. You can scroll back yourself. And you engaged with them yourself, fanboy.
2. I'm a programmer, I have used linux/unix for decades. I write java applications, bash scripts, run docker images/containers etc, all things in which headless unix machines excell. Always a surprise whether you need apt get or yum to install a missing tool. I don't do linux on the desktop, let alone to make music. Sox will work ok, it's a cli utility.

But none of that is relevant, is it? Why the question?

[esc] [:] [x] [!]

[j_e_g]

My experience is that Linux does indeed exihibit problems from time to time, And Windows does to an approximately equal degree.

Linux used to be a nightmare to get up and running. Now the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. Slip a linux live usb stick in, run the installer, and in 15 minutes you've got a working linux system. Run the Windows installer, and an hour later, you'll now start searching the internet for drivers for all the nonfunctional components marked with a red cross in "device/hardware manager" (and hope you're not using wireless to access the internet, otherwise you'll be using a second computer to download the wireless card's driver. Or maybe spend an hour rummaging through your old cdroms for the disc that came with the card when you bought it, and hope the driver on it isn't so old that it no longer works.) Nevertheless, it will take you hours surfing the web for drivers for all your cheap chinese components. Those drivers will be made/supplied by some obscure chip manufacturer, (not the one-man company that makes the actual product you bought, and doesn't directly support the outsourced chips). This will have you tearing out your hair to find those drivers. You'll probably download and install several drivers you think are the right ones, but aren't, and will need to be subsequently (and laboriously) removed. After all that work, then you get the privilege of dealing with some "Genuine Interrogation" copy-protection routine to prove to Microsoft that you're innocent of software piracy (and which starts with the premise of assumed guilt). Then after hours of "installation", and dozens of reboots, you'll finally have a working system boot up... which will promptly send off your private data to Microsoft so that a message can pop up asking if you would like to upgrade to a more recent version of Windows, which should you agree, will likely entail more nightmarish "installation consequences" to solve.

If the vast majority of people didn't buy their computer pre-installed with Windows (by the computer seller), those folks would all be forced to use Linux, because there's no way in hell that they could do a complete WIndows install.

[EnGee]

Well, I think people read this thread mostly to know which distro is good for music making, what kind of tools used, is this setup or that setup useful for him/her, ...etc.

I found something useful from dellboy as he upgraded his Mint distro and when I did, it was as he said, great progress

Now, over the years, I've tried several distros but only few years ago I could successfully made a usable music making setup. What worked for me was Ubuntu, Ubuntu Studio and now Mint. The main application and reason to use Linux is Bitwig for me. Without it, maybe Reaper, but I doubt I would use it as my main DAW. I didn't like other DAWs like Ardour, so Bitwig is the way to go for me on Linux. The official Linux on Bitwig website is Ubuntu. I could make it work with Ubuntu and Ubuntu Studio without a problem in the past.

So, it is nice to read about other's setup in Linux and what distro they have tried and why they are using now what they are using (for music making). I think if we concentrate on this, it would be more useful than Linux vs the world

[lunardigs]

1. I don't care who. You can scroll back yourself. And you engaged with them yourself, fanboy.
2. I'm a programmer, I have used linux/unix for decades. I write java applications, bash scripts, run docker images/containers etc, all things in which headless unix machines excell. Always a surprise whether you need apt get or yum to install a missing tool. I don't do linux on the desktop, let alone to make music. Sox will work ok, it's a cli utility.

But none of that is relevant, is it? Why the question?

[esc] [:] [x] [!]

So, you don't use Linux as a desktop, and you don't use it for music production ...
Yet you were the first person to post?
And now you're wondering how my question is relevant?
Amazing

[lunardigs]

Howdy, y'all! I daily-drive and produce music on Linux.
Tell me about your serious griefs and I will try to help.

[ghettosynth]

My experience is that Linux does indeed exihibit problems from time to time, And Windows does to an approximately equal degree.

Pretty much. I still remember the days of spending hours configuring X. I ran into an issue recently with wifi and Linux. It seems that there's no driver for the latest mediatek wifi6 card which came in a cheap laptop that I just picked up.

[Tiles]

Pretty much.

How do you come to this conclusion? Windows is plug and play in the very most cases. You can run into trouble too, no question. But it is definitely not the rule. I have to think many years back that i really had to fix something by myself. It simply works flawless since many years. And i do a lot with my PC. Programming, development, graphics, music.

Linux on the other hand is still plug and pray and Google regularly. I had my fun just yesterday again. Debian 12 does not allow to install Hip in our needed version, and the workarounds to install higher versions than the default 5.3 fails. I am even sure that i could get it to work when i spend another two weeks of research, but my job is simply not Linux. Officially Hip is just available for Ubuntu anyways. Welcome to the dependency hell.

I told it here before, i had an odyssey to find a working linux distro for our needs last year. My favourite was Rocky 9 where a vital continue button was simply offscreen. Not to install. At one point the button then showed, but i didn't even bother to find out why anymore. Rocky 9 is dead thanks to Red Hat pulling the dependency plug. Debian 12 failed with the default Gnome desktop. It crashed at startup even after the third reinstall from scratch. I had to install Cinnamon instead. And now we need to do distro hopping again because of the Hip issue.

For me Linux is permanent and daily problem solving in a way that i never just closely experienced with Windows in many years.

[Tiles]

Well, I think people read this thread mostly to know which distro is good for music making, what kind of tools used, is this setup or that setup useful for him/her, ...etc.

I would go with the most conservative multimedia solution. Ubuntu Studio for example. Everything more experimental and exotic will give you imho even more trouble.

[j_e_g]

the most conservative multimedia solution. Ubuntu Studio

That actually isn't a "conservative" distro. Canonical (the company behind ubuntu) tend to make a lot of customizations to third party software, with the result that the behavior of the distro can be at odds with the rest of the linux ecosystem. If you want conservative, you want Debian. (But for music, just get AV Linux, which is based upon a debian deriviative).