Between a rock and a hard place

[avid_d]

The TLDR is: how much of a pain is it to get music making working efficiently on Linux?

The situation is that for many years I was happily using my Windows 10 PC for my hobby of making noises. A few weeks ago, I made the very bad decision to upgrade my machine to Windows 11. The initial upgrade was a disaster, with folder permissions changed all over the place, system crashes, system freezes. I have been working through the issues as they arise and, whilst my system is now useable, it is definitely worse than pre-upgrade.

I have some experience of Linux, having installed it on two older laptops (one as my travel laptop, the other for RAW photo editing using Darktable). So, I have been considering whether the fix to my Windows 11 woes is to make the switch to Linux for music making (accepting a potentially heavy cost of losing some/most of my favourite VSTs and my preferred DAW - Reason).

Having an old (2012) MacMini available to me, I tried a fresh instal of three Linux flavours: a pure Debian build; the Ubuntu Studio; AV Linux MX (Liquorix kernel). Of these, AV Linux MX was my favourite.

I also tried out 3 Linux build DAWS: Bitwig 5 - I already had an old licence; Waveform Pro 13.5 - again, I had a Waveform licence available; Ardour 9.5 (new to me). Ardour worked significantly better than the other two on my set up, though I have no experience of Ardour and was struggling to understand its set up. BUT, and it is a big “but’, all three DAWS were incredibly heavy on the system - clicks, pops, stuttering GUI freezing started quite quickly; in Bitwig, a single instance of Quanta 2 (a granular synth) maxed everything out if I used more than just 4 voices. I was using my Behringer audio device, set at 48kHz and 1024 samples to seek to reduce overhead. All my testing was done with LV2 or Linux build VST3s. I steered clear of getting into running Windows stuff through Wine.

I realise that my test environment (a 2012 MacMini with 8Gb RAM and only 4 cores) is far from ideal, but I used to be able to run both GarageBand and Logic pretty well on that machine for at least 10 tracks.

Is Linux significantly worse for power efficiency for music making than Windows or Apple? Or is it simply not suited to my old test environment and will work as well on modern equipment as Windows? Does it need lots of command line tinkering to get it working well?

As it stands, I am heavily on the side of just fixing the Windows 11 issues as they pop up, rather than risking an even more dysfunctional Linux set up. If there are any out there who have done the switch and found near identical or even better efficiency using Linux on their machine please let me know and, more importantly, how did you achieve it?

[knob_monster]

If you want to spend your time making music instead of tweaking configurations, stick with Windows 11.

Linux is efficient, but out-of-the-box it doesn't automatically grant real-time thread scheduling privileges to audio DAWs. That's why you are getting clicks and pops even at 1024 samples. You have to manually edit limits.conf and configure RT priorities for your audio group to get it working right.

Plus, losing Reason and your favorite VSTs is a heavy price. A clean, fresh install of Windows 11 will save you the most time and headache.

[avid_d]

@knob_monster: thank you for the swift reply.

Perhaps, when I am having an off day, I will spend at bit more time on the test machine trying to understand some of the complexities in fine tuning Linux audio.

In the meantime, Windows it remains.

[knob_monster]

Makes sense. If you do end up playing around with that test machine on an off day, check out a utility script called rtcqs (Real-Time Configuration Quick Scan). It scans your Linux installation and spits out a simple list of exactly which limits, CPU governors, or USB settings need tweaking for audio.

Good luck with the Windows rebuild.

[Pictus]

In the meantime, Windows it remains.

Your friend viewtopic.php?p=9231331#p9231331

[TechHaus]

Just downloaded Quanta to test on my 2016 Thinkpad (which is only 2 cores). Choked on 7 notes, but REAPER was unsmooth with the gui open, and more responsive with the plugin closed (at 24/48 512).

My advice, use Hive and lightweight instruments!

No tinkering needed and if you choose a non-debian distro you will probably slay windows, imo.

[TechHaus]

My distro comes with "libpipewire-module-rt" out of the box. There is nothing to tweak for realtime.

I don't understand what folks are using on their systems where tweaks are necessary.

You can just install your OS and go. Easier than Mac, imo.

[legendCNCD]

How much latency is this realtime then and does it keep up to cpu at 95%+ at 64 or 32 samples like on Windows?

[procrastive]

You might want to try asking your linux audio questions at linuxmusicians.com. There's also a subreddit devoted to linux audio.

[TechHaus]

Don't use reddit folks.