Linux Users, What's You Distro Experience?

[dellboy]

Did you check the laptop and components for Linux compatibility? Confirm that your parts are compatible with Linux.

What is the make and model of your laptop? What are the specs?

It's just an old Toshiba i3 that I had kicking around doing nothing, so I am using it to test various distros on. That, and a 256GB USB stick with Ventoy installed and many distros on it. Ventoy is a great little app for testing stuff. The trouble is that a lot of distros are not including a live ISO any more and have to be installed to test them.

What model of Toshiba is it?

It's a Toshiba Satellite C50. It's at the barest limit of Fedora requirements, I guess. I am not sure why you want to know this? I have zero intention of using it as a work machine. It's just to try various distros out on to see if I like the general GUI etc. My main laptop is a nine-month-old Lenovo Yoga 7 16 inch touchscreen which currently has Windows 11 installed. I do not intend to install Linux on that, but I do boot Linux from an external SSD successfully from it.

[audiojunkie]

Did you check the laptop and components for Linux compatibility? Confirm that your parts are compatible with Linux.

What is the make and model of your laptop? What are the specs?

It's just an old Toshiba i3 that I had kicking around doing nothing, so I am using it to test various distros on. That, and a 256GB USB stick with Ventoy installed and many distros on it. Ventoy is a great little app for testing stuff. The trouble is that a lot of distros are not including a live ISO any more and have to be installed to test them.

What model of Toshiba is it?

It's a Toshiba Satellite C50. It's at the barest limit of Fedora requirements, I guess. I am not sure why you want to know this? I have zero intention of using it as a work machine. It's just to try various distros out on to see if I like the general GUI etc. My main laptop is a nine-month-old Lenovo Yoga 7 16 inch touchscreen which currently has Windows 11 installed. I do not intend to install Linux on that, but I do boot Linux from an external SSD successfully from it.

You’ve mentioned several problems with linux on it. I wanted to check compatibility to see what might be hanging you up. But, I guess it’s not too important.

[NWSM]

SYS:
MX Linux 23.6, debian-based, Debian 12, KDE, X11 Windowmanager (most Plugins open with it), Alsa, Pipewire, Wireplumber

9 Month on Linux and i did not touch windows.

Bitwig works pretty good with the most native 3th Party Linux Plugins, internal Audio.
All standards internal stuff works perfectly fine. Plugins Samples, Drag Drop, Recording, Export, Midi, Saving, Multiple open Project, Sandboxing.

What i really like is Bitwig is connected to other other Apps Audio like Firefox. So i can fast record any Sound from there into Bitwig.

Issues:

The biggest issue i have is with some Audio DamageCLAP, VST3 Plugins. I think this behaves to the graphics and the kinda slowed down GFX Nvidia implementation and X11, kwin, xwayland in my Debian System and Setting. KombinatTri and Ascent works the best. But i really love the Installer of them. Its literally click install for CLAP, VST and LV Plugins and the installer contains Manual, Website, Support. There no better Installer on market.

Some HY Plugins need a little workaround in the Terminal (libcurl4, patchelf)
-> a guide to fix it: https://github.com/cxbignekoc/Bitwig-5. ... /README.md

yabridge is too complicated. I know how it works but i prefer native Plugins. It motivates me reading about what yabridge can do and at any time i will try again.

[kvotchin]

So far, so good. Switched from Mint to CachyOS, and wow, it’s the fastest, most responsive OS I’ve encountered. Reaper is rock solid; might look into Bitwig if I deem it necessary. Latency is the lowest it’s been, across three OSs.

[chaocrator]

i've married Ubuntu installation with LibraZiK repos, so i get best of two worlds — Ubuntu that is best supported for 3rd party / commercial apps, and LibraZiK that has tons of native Linux audio apps packaged (yes, more than KX Studio repos, and maintained much more actively).
you likely shouldn't try this approach because you'll have to solve lots of dependency mismatches and conflicts to make it work — but i'm a senior system administrator with two decades of experience, so i can.

regarding DE: i'm using unofficial GTK3 port of LXDE from PPA because it's still the lightest complete DE in terms of resourses (and because i'm used to it).

this year Bitwig finally became my main DAW for 90% of tasks because MIDI export issue that bugged me for a decade finally was fixed. i even upgraded from Producer to full-blown Bitwig Studio to celebrate that.
however, i still prefer Harrison Mixbus (32C) for the final mixing stage.

[havran]

My experience with Linux distros is that there are so many nice and interesting ones that I seem to be incapable of just settling on one and then proceeding to do some things other than distro-hop.

Of the major distro families, I tend to prefer Arch- or Manjaro-based because their repos include some third-party apps that I use (just a matter of convenience, because I really don't have a problem with unzipping a download and running its install script). I don't have anything against Fedora or Debian-based distros, though.

For the desktop, I prefer not to have panels taking up space, and just a digital clock in the corner (or just a very short dock with a clock and a few other items). Of course I make use of keyboard shortcuts for my most frequently used apps.

[BertKoor]

So... my wife, she's so endeering. Ask her what car she drives, and she'll say "a red one". In 2014 she needed a new laptop, so I got her a (cheap) red HP Pavillion P15, 4 core AMD, 6G ram, 500mb hdd 5200 rpm. Reached EOL some years ago (king of sluggish) and was laying in my closet. Probably a clean install of Windows would make it fast again, although ram & hdd speed are limiting. Anyway, this is my experience putting Linux on it.

Settled for Linux Mint. I do many other things on it, AV Linux would be overkill. Then for destop I chose xkcd. Yeah I know, that's not the name but I cannot remember. Downloaded ISO, on mac it's a simple right-click and pick "burn to disk". Had to find my spindle with blank DVDs first. First attempt failed verify, second burned slower was OK.

Shrinked the ntfs partition, made 200 mb free space for linux on its own partition. Will keep dual booting, this is my only Win10 testing machine. First boot from DVD was very slow. After the install it's ok. Maybe 30 secs and you can run programs.

Start the Software Manager. There are 5 versions of keepass. Flatpak version: 3GB. Wtf, larger than the whole OS!? Any other version: 3 mb. The first I tried used a font of 8 pixels high. You need to care about with what gui library things are compiled. Some software does not have the little menu to move it to another workspace.

Challenge: install something not made available by Software Manager, but only as tar.gz. Figure out where to put it, where to make symlink so the bin is on the path. How to add to the start bar. What do you even call the Start Menu on linux? That depends, it is maddening. The whiskey menu! Add application! LibreMenu? That is not the order of apps I have in my panel.

Another thing I installed via Software Manager (PHP8.3) was not complete, needed extensions. The extensions I installed via the same method were no good. Read official install docs: do "sudo apt install" on terminal, and it's ok.

So far, it keeps me off the street. Not very productive, yet. Tried to start MS Teams in Opera, not a good idea. Mouse cursor updates was done once every 5 secs with delay of a full minute. Had to power-cycle it out of its misery.

[audiojunkie]

Bummer experience.... Sorry that happened.

Not all hardware is linux compatible. I will guess that most of your laptop hardware was compatible--some of your problems could be due to that. A good way of testing to see if your hardware is compatible with linux, is to run a live distro. If it works on a live distro, then chances are that it's compatible. However, if something doesn't work on a live distro, then you probably have some compatibility problems, and that will mean that you'll have problems with everything else. So confirming hardware compatibility is the first thing one should do.

Linux Mint is a decent choice. I never liked dual booting, because Windows likes to take over the master record too often. However, based on your description, it doesn't look you had that problem.

As far as multiple versions of software go, there are sometimes different architecture versions, such as for ARM or X86_64. There are also bit versions such as 32bit or 64bit. Sometimes there are special versions where certain things were compiled into the binary, or certain things were left out of the compile. It's best to read and research very well to determine which version is the one you want.

Then, there are multiple repositories that can be added. The best option, is to use your default repository and not add any extended repositories unless you absolutely need them. Your default repository should have all the libraries compiled best for your version of your software. Extra repositories may or may not do this, and you have to be really careful so that you don't end up with dependency problems, where there are library mismatches.

Flatpaks are special beasts that have special pros and cons. They are sandboxed applications. You don't need to worry about dependency problems, because the application comes with all of the needed dependencies (and the right versions of them) added to the package. That's why the file is so large. If you install a flatpak, you can be fairly certain that it is going to install and run--provided you got your flatpak from a reliable source, that is. Verified sources are the best. So the pros are that they will run really well, while the cons are the size of the application.

Another thing to know is that you don't want to use flatpaks for music production at this time. The music world uses a host and then plugins. The host (the DAW) has to see the plugin location, in order to run the plugin. Flatpaks can only see your home folder. Nowadays, developers are starting to install their plugins to the home folder, but not all do. The old way had files and libraries stored in traditional linux locations. The nice thing is that this is changing. But for now, it's best to not use flatpaks for your music applications. Use them for other things.

Anything that uses tar.gz has likely been compiled, but not packaged for a package manager. You will likely have to get instructions from the developer that compiled it to determine where the file needs to be installed. You will also want to check to find out what distro and distro version it was compiled on, so that you can be sure that you aren't installing something that has newer libraries than what your distro uses. Sometimes there is a readme that has this information. Sometimes there is an SH file (an install script) that will install the program for you. But they are certainly more difficult to install than most other things.

If you have any other questions, just ask. We can help.

[GaryG]

Been pretty much daily driving with Ubuntu studio for a month or two with no issues this time around (qhd monitor all working lovely now, just swapped HDMI cable for a DP one, who knew HDMI drivers were such a minefield )
Being a restless soul, playing with other distros out of curiosity, small question: if I swap the DE on av linux, would you lose any functionality, the yabridge tool etc? Sorry, not liking enlightenment at all.

[audiojunkie]

Been pretty much daily driving with Ubuntu studio for a month or two with no issues this time around (qhd monitor all working lovely now, just swapped HDMI cable for a DP one, who knew HDMI drivers were such a minefield )
Being a restless soul, playing with other distros out of curiosity, small question: if I swap the DE on av linux, would you lose any functionality, the yabridge tool etc? Sorry, not liking enlightenment at all.

I guess it depends on your linux skill. I had always read that it was difficult to do it without problems. I always started with a distro that I liked, with a DE that I liked, and tuned it for low latency. It certainly can be done, but I don’t know how (there’s always more to learn with Linux).

I would suggest reaching out to GMaq, on the LinuxMusicians forum. I’m sure he could help you, since he swaps the DE when making AVLinux.

[GaryG]

I always started with a distro that I liked, with a DE that I liked, and tuned it for low latency.

I'm the opposite I guess, get a distro with all the really techey bits in place (low latnecy kernal etc), thinking easier to swap the DE...

I'll have a play later and report back.

Thanks.

[GaryG]

Had a play... installing different DEs was simple, just from the app manager. Tried XFCE and KDE, both basically just worked, AVL specific tools etc too, 'only' issue was the wifi icon in XCFE stopped working then wifi failed completely in KDE. Not sure what that has to do with the DE so maybe I borked it with XCFE somehow...

Whatever, generally works though then thought if I'm running KDE on a Debian based distro I may as well stick with Ubuntu Studio as it's working fine for me... Fun way to spend a Sunday afternoon, learnt stuff so all good...

[audiojunkie]

Nice!

[GaryG]

Well my experience of ubuntu studio has been positive to the point of thinking about wiping windows off my main box so it's purely linux.

I was looking at wiping my main 1TB nvme drive for a clean install and found starting to think in terms of partitions for audio away from the system partition etc etc like I have for over twenty years but... am I stuck in old windows ways? Is that strictly necessary now with fast drives? I dont do massive projects, rarely record more than a track at a time so can I just have one massive home partition or is there still security to be had keeping things partitioned off maybe?

[audiojunkie]

Well my experience of ubuntu studio has been positive to the point of thinking about wiping windows off my main box so it's purely linux.

I was looking at wiping my main 1TB nvme drive for a clean install and found starting to think in terms of partitions for audio away from the system partition etc etc like I have for over twenty years but... am I stuck in old windows ways? Is that strictly necessary now with fast drives? I dont do massive projects, rarely record more than a track at a time so can I just have one massive home partition or is there still security to be had keeping things partitioned off maybe?

Drives just keep getting faster and faster. It becomes less and less important every year. I'd say you'd probably be just fine.