Linux Users, What's You Distro Experience?

[dellboy]

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).

Yesterday I was de-cluttering the junk room and found an old intel i3 laptop which is at least 10 years old. So I decided to install AV Linux on it. I am using it now to post this message. There are good things and bad things about it. The good thing is that it has Yabridge GUI onboard whch makes installing Windows vsts relatively easy. Wine is pre-installed. The bad thing is that it seems to have been heavily hacked about. Its not possible to update Firefox for instance. In the Firefox about box it says that "Updates are disabled by your organization", and this makes me worried about security in this distro. I tried to install Bitwig, which comes in Flatpak or Deb. Neither option could be installed without messing around in the terminal, a no-go for a newbie.

The good news is that I did get Bitwig installed on this very old and weak laptop and it worked fine just by plugging in a USB keyboard and headphones, and with latency around 6ms using pipewire.

[Artie Fichelle]

With linux you have choice. I still wonder why some Devs say they cannot compile a linux version.
But others can easily, like U-he, Reaper, Bitwig, Ardour and many others. Looks to bevan excuse. Especially for Ableton, where Push seems to be already on Linux.
Apple won't do it, because they sell a hardware dongle, but Steinberg, belonging to Yamaha, they could break the wall of ignorance, once they do it.

[Tiles]

With linux you have choice. I still wonder why some Devs say they cannot compile a linux version.
But others can easily, like U-he, Reaper, Bitwig, Ardour and many others.

It is not easily. Else everybody would do it. It is hard. That's why so few does it.

And it heavily depends. And that in the truest sense of the word. Dependencies is one of the biggest issues with Linux. We had our software released. And two weeks later an updated Ubuntu came out, one of the usual 04 to 10 jumps. And removed a vital dependency that we needed. With a point upgrade. And now tell your users why your software does not work anymore. And that was just one fine tiny example of the overhead that i talk about. Since this was just one of the distros. Multiplicate it with 600. None of the linux distros is reliable.

Let me link the video from Linus torvalds again. He lists all the problems that i as a software developer with linux have. Alone the GlibC makes us lotsa fun.

[Largos]

BLAH BLAH BORING BLAH

We don't need to hear your asinine poorly informed reasons for not using something every time it's mentioned. You're not going to gaslight people happily using it by talking about it not being "Pro" or whatever. Where's your pro stuff? Who are you? Nobody, be quiet, trolling with this ill informed crap. You all haven't got time to deal with Linux but you've got time to post on every linux thread about how you don't like it.

[BertKoor]

[...] your asinine poorly informed reasons for not using something
[...] Nobody, be quiet

That is not what he said. You have no idea who he is.
You have not paid attention to what he actually wrote.

You are disqualified.

[revvy]

f**k me, Largos is off! Stunned!

What happens next might surprise you…

[Artie Fichelle]

...

Let me link the video from Linus torvalds again. He lists all the problems that i as a software developer with linux have. Alone the GlibC makes us lotsa fun.

Thanks, that video made the problems clear to me.
As I have said, I have fully working win11 system for music, and and separate system running debian 12, that works for certain stuff.

[Largos]

[...] your asinine poorly informed reasons for not using something
[...] Nobody, be quiet

That is not what he said. You have no idea who he is.
You have not paid attention to what he actually wrote.

You are disqualified.

He has repeatedly come on with the same nonsense threadrot any time he sees people talking about linux. I don't know why him, wacksound etc can't just let people talk about what software they use without repeatedly imposing their poor takes.

[uOpt]

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.

In most laptops the wifi chip is a M.2 card that you can easily change.

Replace it with this Intel chip:
https://www.amazon.com/Intel-802-11ax-B ... ref=sr_1_1

[FrettedSynth]

KVR definition of a fanboy! Anyone who uses something you don't or flat out can't figure out, who calls BS when when others say "it can't be done"

Linux for over two years here audio only. Not interested in office applications. So yes it can be done.

[lunardigs]

Don't buy cutting edge stuff. Which is sensible in general, regardless of Linux.
And for beginners, know the big three distros:
- Debian
- Arch
- Red Hat
Most all other distros are based on these.
Debian based is not for cutting edge. This included Ubuntu.
Red Hat stuff, like Fedora, Suse and Rocky benefit from the big corp influence, but have become increasingly antithetical to FOSS, and that trend should likely continue.
Then there's Arch based stuff, which is where it's at lately, if you ask me. I would encourage people to look at this instead of Ubuntu, or Fedora. Give Manjaro, with Plasma desktop a try as a starting place I'd say.

KVR definition of a fanboy! Anyone who uses something you don't or flat out can't figure out, who calls BS when when others say "it can't be done"

Linux for over two years here audio only. Not interested in office applications. So yes it can be done.

100%

[audiojunkie]

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).

Yesterday I was de-cluttering the junk room and found an old intel i3 laptop which is at least 10 years old. So I decided to install AV Linux on it. I am using it now to post this message. There are good things and bad things about it. The good thing is that it has Yabridge GUI onboard whch makes installing Windows vsts relatively easy. Wine is pre-installed. The bad thing is that it seems to have been heavily hacked about. Its not possible to update Firefox for instance. In the Firefox about box it says that "Updates are disabled by your organization", and this makes me worried about security in this distro. I tried to install Bitwig, which comes in Flatpak or Deb. Neither option could be installed without messing around in the terminal, a no-go for a newbie.

The good news is that I did get Bitwig installed on this very old and weak laptop and it worked fine just by plugging in a USB keyboard and headphones, and with latency around 6ms using pipewire.

While there ARE many GUI front ends for most things, there always will be a little terminal usage required by Linux. That’s just a given. Even newbies need to be aware of this. You’ll get it. Be patient with yourself.

By the way, GDEbi is a nice Deb. GUI.

[audiojunkie]

BLAH BLAH BORING BLAH

We don't need to hear your asinine poorly informed reasons for not using something every time it's mentioned. You're not going to gaslight people happily using it by talking about it not being "Pro" or whatever. Where's your pro stuff? Who are you? Nobody, be quiet, trolling with this ill informed crap. You all haven't got time to deal with Linux but you've got time to post on every linux thread about how you don't like it.

It’s funny that Microsoft problems aren’t mentioned more often. I work in IT, and our company, and the company that is our partner (both companies in excess of 65000 workers has had non-stop problems with PXE images—constant install failures and corrupt SCCM/MECM issues over the last year. Currently the migration to the new version is on pause, halfway done, because installs weren’t going through. The problem is still on going. And the new Teams was pushed out as buggy as a beta, and Microsoft just wanted to fix it with micro updates. We use Windows and Linux—we never hear of problems with Linux.

[ghettosynth]

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.

In most laptops the wifi chip is a M.2 card that you can easily change.

Replace it with this Intel chip:
https://www.amazon.com/Intel-802-11ax-B ... ref=sr_1_1

Absolutely. I wasn't really asking how to solve the problem. It was just a rare occasion that something relatively recent didn't work out of the box. In fact, of the handful of laptops that I've used over the last decade or so, it's the first one that I've encountered wifi issues with. It's been some time since I was frustrated by a broadcom chipset on something that couldn't be easily swapped out.

While it's certainly true that, other than a lot of legacy audio hardware, Windows will often work out of the box with most new hardware, it's also true, as pointed out by the post that I quoted, that Windows has become a long winded drawn out install that takes hours while you wait for all of the updates. This, of course, assumes that you don't have a problem using your microsoft account to log in and access the system. Even with Windows pro it has been a bit of a hassle for sometime now to force the use of a local login.

At any rate, as I've mentioned more than once in this thread, I'm the wrong guy to try to convince that Linux is teh evil, because I don't really care if non-technical people use it or not. I would never recommend it to someone who doesn't have a technical/tinkerer's background.

Bottom line here is that I also find Linux installs to be relatively pain free today and Windows is a much more long winded affair where you have to make sure to invoke just the right incantations to avoid logging in to your ms account as they are constantly moving the goal posts in order to gather more info.

I didn't even bother to activate the windows that came with the aforementioned laptop. It's a 128GB ssd with Windows Home which I have almost no use for in a day to day laptop, so I popped it out and replaced it before I even powered it on for the first time.

[WackyZoundz]

Dependencies is one of the biggest issues with Linux.

Absolutely. The whole Linux dependency system is just a nightmare to work with and there is still no solution in sight.