Linux Users, What's You Distro Experience?

[Artie Fichelle]

To finalize it: Use Linux and get familiar with it, and for music use Win11. Except you have ideological reasons not to use it.

[audiojunkie]

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.

The solution is here, but many are unwilling to acknowledge it, because they don’t like the solution. Next generation Linux, using Cloud Native technologies such as compartmentalization, sandboxing, universal packaging, and immutability has solved those problems—every one of them. Fedora Silverblue is just one distro of many that solves all of the problems—and I’d be willing to debate anyone on the subject. The problem comes from those (including Tiles) who refuses to even acknowledge the solution, and reverts back to that same old 14 year old Linux video as his only leg to stand on. That’s why I get so frustrated when he spews the same old antiquated drivel. Linux is WAY more than just the kernel. It’s way more than Torvalds or Stallman—that’s why I refuse to bend to the FSF’s demands that I call it GNU/Linux—despite what their FAQ says.

I won’t waste time reposting what I’ve reposted previously about the Cloud Native next generation Linux model unless you are truly interested in it. I at first thought you were a sock puppet of Tiles initially when you first posted to a different Linux thread several weeks ago, but I have accepted that you are a different person that just uses similar ways of speech and has similar gripes against Linux. I won’t waste any more breath on Tiles, but if you, being different, are interested in hearing about next generation Linux technologies and solutions, I’d be willing to explain.

[WackyZoundz]

can't just let people talk about what software they use without repeatedly imposing their poor takes.

It's a poor take to criticise having to compile your own kernel to get a mouse polling rate higher than 1 Hz? Or to be forced to program your own drivers?

Don't get me wrong, I can live with that. I just use the touchpad instead and use Windows or Mac for audio and video production. I'm fine with using Linux only to browse the internet or to use LibreOffice. I use what works. But I'm not pretending that Linux is on par with Windows or Mac. That would be delusional.

[audiojunkie]

can't just let people talk about what software they use without repeatedly imposing their poor takes.

It's a poor take to criticise having to compile your own kernel to get a mouse polling rate higher than 1 Hz? Or to be forced to program your own drivers?

Don't get me wrong, I can live with that. I just use the touchpad instead and use Windows or Mac for audio and video production. I'm fine with using Linux only to browse the internet or to use LibreOffice. I use what works. But I'm not pretending that Linux is on par with Windows or Mac. That would be delusional.

Class compliance is a standard and is your friend. Us it where possible and you won’t have those problems.

[gearwatcher]

I have used Linux, initially a SUSE, but for more than a decade usually a variant of Debian/Ubuntu for work for most part of the last 18 years and never ran into any of these issues people keep talking about.

As for audo - wine isn't great, doesn’t come as a free lunch in terms of CPU overhead, and Live and many of my daily driver plugins just don't work on Linux natively which is why I do audio on Windows, but native stuff works excellent and non-native ie Windows software works mostly well (some things refuse to work) in audio if you can use e.g Bitwig and Linux native plugins mostly for music making I'd think twice if I would bother with Windows.

Company policy has moved me to Mac for work for last 4 years so I only use Linux for testing stuff lately - still without any issues.

[dellboy]

can't just let people talk about what software they use without repeatedly imposing their poor takes.

It's a poor take to criticise having to compile your own kernel to get a mouse polling rate higher than 1 Hz? Or to be forced to program your own drivers?

Don't get me wrong, I can live with that. I just use the touchpad instead and use Windows or Mac for audio and video production. I'm fine with using Linux only to browse the internet or to use LibreOffice. I use what works. But I'm not pretending that Linux is on par with Windows or Mac. That would be delusional.

What is a "mouse polling rate"?

What is it for?

Do I need it?

This message is posted from Mint Linux that I just installed this afternoon, on a 12 year old laptop, using a cheap generic mouse.I installed Bitwig, plugged in a 37 key irig keyboard, plugged in my headphones, installed Yabridge and some vsts and I am making music using the onboard soundchip. The latency is 6ms with no crackles. I am just a hobbyist. Would I use Linux for pro music? No, I have a Windows 11 laptop with lots of pro stuff installed for that. But for hobbyist music its just fine.

[uOpt]

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

Well, it's technically not a Linux distribution, but FreeBSD is much more robust against dependency hell.

In FreeBSD the entire base system with basic commandline utilities is not in the same package system as applications. That base system is sufficient for boot, admin and package management.

As a result if you have dependency hell on FreeBSD you can just blow away all packages and reinstall them without even rebooting, much less reinstalling the OS.

[ghettosynth]

can't just let people talk about what software they use without repeatedly imposing their poor takes.

It's a poor take to criticise having to compile your own kernel to get a mouse polling rate higher than 1 Hz? Or to be forced to program your own drivers?

It's a poor take to generalize this as a common problem. It's a niche problem that you encountered, and, I'm not going to dig into the thread, but, I find it very hard to believe that you had a 1Hz polling rate. The default is 10ms, or 100Hz which gets rounded down to 8ms.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mouse_polling_rate

I wouldn't spend a minute recompiling a kernel to fix a 1Hz polling rate. There's a potential related solution for my mediatek wifi card as well, ain't nobody got time for that.

In my decades of work, some of it professional, I've never once had to mess with the mouse polling rate on any system. While there may be some concern about this in certain CAD or video editing applications, it's largely a gamer problem and largely specific to first person shooters, yawn.

To be clear, this isn't unique to Linux. My EMU PCIe soundcard works well enough in Linux, but there's an entire thread on how to get it working in Windows. I'm not going through all of that to get a cheap soundcard working that is no longer supported in Windows. Again, this is a niche problem. Its existence doesn't mean anything with respect to the quality of the underlying operating system.

I encounter niche problems all the time. They often have no solution in Windows because Windows is almost entirely proprietary and any solution requires someone else to modify software.

[Tiles]

He did not generalize. He gave an example. Niche problems are a dime a dozen in Linux distros ...

FreeBSD

Mac started there afaik

[WackyZoundz]

If the same problems occur on thee different systems with different Linux distros (and even more versions of those), can it be called a niche problem? I don't think so. I guess the mouse issue (which is by far not the only problem) has to do with the kernel not processing touchpad and mouse input separately. The only thing I haven't tried yet is editing the kernel. I can't find enough information on how to do that so I have to skip this step and wait for someone to finally solve this issue. Even if I could manage to run native audio software without the usual crashes, buffer underruns, GUI issues etc - working with a touchpad instead of a mouse is out of the question. Not fast enough, not precise enough. Not to mention that none of my audio interfaces work thanks to the lack of drivers. And because of that Linux remains office-only (Thankfully I don't have to print anything because printers don't work either).

Maybe I give SteamOS a try at some point. It could theoretically run some Windows programs.

[lunardigs]

This whole thing about dependency hell, wtf? With all that I do on Linux--and I only use Linux, for like 2 decades now--why isn't this my experience?
This is why I say it sounds like hyperbole in here.

[ghettosynth]

If the same problems occur on thee different systems with different Linux distros (and even more versions of those), can it be called a niche problem?

Yes, you have a niche problem.

Maybe I give SteamOS a try at some point. It could theoretically run some Windows programs.

Go back to Windows, it seems more suited to your needs. Stop torturing everyone with your endless rantings about problems that you can't solve. Or, as they say RTFM!

[uOpt]

This whole thing about dependency hell, wtf? With all that I do on Linux--and I only use Linux, for like 2 decades now--why isn't this my experience?
This is why I say it sounds like hyperbole in here.

I had a Debian machine commit suicide in unresolvable dependencies just last year.

Granted, it is not very common and I run quite a few machines. But it is very unusual for me not to be able to repair an installation.

I also had a pretty fresh Mint installation with dependency problems a few months back. But in that case the stack of to-be-uninstalled packages to resolve the problem was shallow enough for recovery.

[audiojunkie]

If the same problems occur on thee different systems with different Linux distros (and even more versions of those), can it be called a niche problem? I don't think so. I guess the mouse issue (which is by far not the only problem) has to do with the kernel not processing touchpad and mouse input separately. The only thing I haven't tried yet is editing the kernel. I can't find enough information on how to do that so I have to skip this step and wait for someone to finally solve this issue. Even if I could manage to run native audio software without the usual crashes, buffer underruns, GUI issues etc - working with a touchpad instead of a mouse is out of the question. Not fast enough, not precise enough. Not to mention that none of my audio interfaces work thanks to the lack of drivers. And because of that Linux remains office-only (Thankfully I don't have to print anything because printers don't work either).

Maybe I give SteamOS a try at some point. It could theoretically run some Windows programs.

Stop trying to force a square peg into a round hole. Do your research, and use well supported hardware. This goes for Windows as well. There have been hundreds, if not thousands of poorly supported Windows hardware with driver problems as well. I was dealing with a poorly supported piece of medical equipment with crappy drivers about two months ago that took not only our IT team, but also our support team and the vendor’s support team. We had to escalate the issue within the vendor to the actual driver developer, before we could the the problem resolved. My point is that this is not a problem unique to Linux—any unusual or unpopular hardware with poor driver support can have this problem. The key, is to only use popular, well supported hardware. I am absolutely certain that your mouse experience was from using hardware that was not well supported—in which case, the kind of mouse that you used, not Linux, is the problem. Class compliant hardware is a standard, and does not give you these problems on Linux or Windows. Chalk it up to a learning experience and move forward with that useful knowledge.

[Tiles]

Granted, it is not very common

Common enough. I already mentioned the not working Gnome desktop in Debian 12. I could also mention that Ubuntu started throwing cryptic error messages at me from time to time and crashed away. Which was most probably also a unresolved dependency problem somewhere.

Yes, you have a niche problem.

We have now several dozen examples in this thread, and you still deny each of them as being a niche problem? How many examples would be needed to convince you that the Linux distros has a general stability and dependency problem?

Each Linux distro is a niche already. And they are made of niche problems. I told above already that they are a dime a dozen at the distros. I could throw you to death with all the little naggers that i experienced over the years. For example, try to run Nautilus or Nemo as root from the console.

Asking for a fix i was told that nobody uses Nemo or Nautilus as root. Period. Now guess what happened with the needed fix.

We have again two more examples now. To list all of them is simply impossible. It's too many. But it all boils down to that Linux breaks the user space ways too often and is simply not reliable. Even when for some it works. It is known even by Linus Torvald, this old Windows fanboy ...

Go back to Windows, it seems more suited to your needs. Stop torturing everyone with your endless rantings about problems that you can't solve. Or, as they say RTFM!

Thank you for showing so clearly the second big problem at Linux. The toxic and unfriendly behaviour once you point at a flaw. No way that you will ever get any useful help.

The Manual at which you so proudly point at is the next sad thing at Linux. The Manpages for the distros are made by nerds and are in big parts not to understand without secret knowledge. In case they contain the needed information at all. Since they usually look like a swiss cheese. Big parts are simply missing. Volunteer work, you know.

And now have a problem in a professional pipeline, with a deadline in your neck, with a project that you need to finish. And imagine that instead of help you will get told how oh so great Linux is, that you do it wrong, that you are too dumb to solve the problem anyways, that you need to read the manual first, and so on. This all will not solve your problem. I have long stopped to ask questions at the Debian forum for exact this reason. Toxic as hell. And the level of useful information goes against zero.

Friends, when you want to convince other people from Linux, do you really think it helps to flame the messengers and go toxic? I can just repeat, the propaganda trick did not work in the last 25 years. Why not test another strategy instead? What about fixing the flaws? And stop lying at the people? Simply saying as it is? Yes it has some flaws, but ... Nobody here has a problem with that part. We all know our naggers.

I personally would not do music at Linux. It doesn't do the job for me. Too many limits compared to the much better solutions that i have here, which is Windows, my favourite daw, and all my instruments, from which big parts would simply not run at Linux. But i would never give away my Debian server. I like it. Even with all its flaws. It does the job.

But that's just my personal opinion. Who am i to tell other people what they have to do or not? When you want to make music at Linux, then do it. This was never the question. The points where i joined the discussion here are the false claims. Like Linux has no performance problem. Or that everything works as at Windows or Mac. And that all software is available. And plain questions like why does the world not bend to Linux? And so i did my best to explain why, from the view of a musician, software developer and Linux user. Based at facts where ever possible.