Well, due to divergent information systems planned failing, I've begun migration to Linux via Mint distro Cinnamon.

It was interesting, I created a live boot usb drive from the download, and everything worked great. I was impressed, did the install and proceeded to customize a few things, like that awful default cursor back into a proper arrow and desktop image etc.

Did the full monty all updates when it suggested it, and boom my audio was gone when it finished up and rebooted. Well I trouble shot a bit, and then I reinstalled and only updated the kernel and boom sound was gone again. So i dropped back to original kernel and everything is fine.

It was great, I got a chance to dig into Linux audio stack and how it works, and brushing up on my terminal useage, since I hadn't really used it in about 20 years, except a bit of dabbling with raspberry pi o/s.

I can see Linux being a viable replacement for my windows 7 laptop, now that Firefox is dropping support and I still need a way to check email, online shopping etc. looks like that will be the Linux laptop.

I'll still keep my studio computers windows7 for now, since they aren't connected to internet or any network at all.

 

would be nice to mention your hardware specs, in case others would like to follow similar path, just sayin'

 

linux is great if you are not doing any creative stuff. great for vlc, surfing the web, torrenting, file management. nothing else really

 

I'd be interested to hear how's Mint's Pipewire integration coming along. Note that I'm not pushing anything else, but in CachyOS it's kind of rough but once you get it going it's solid for proper lowlat audio work. I haven't bothered trying to get Windows VSTs working (apparently a lot do though), but native ones (Bitwig, Reaper, U-he stuff, Cardinal, Plugdata) etc. are go.

So please do let us know how's it happening if you do!

 

Just curious to know what experience you have and how recent? If you are a professional user, than you may be right. For amateurs like myself it is good enough. I can run Reaper with several Kontakt libraries without problems. I don't know how a sessions with 250 tracks and several VSTi's and VST's would behave. But running this scenario under windows would definitely also become a problem when you're not having a powerful machine.
For day to day business Linux is very good and you absolutely not need windows.
I started with MX21 which is very user friendly. I am now about to migrate to Manjaro because it is a rolling release which seems a very good idea when you don't want to install a completely new operating system every 6 years or so. But I am glad I started with MX21 to learn things under Linux. I would not recommend Manjaro for first time Linux users!

And of course: welcome @Garamondo Furbish to the Linux club. Hope you will enjoy it as much as I did 3 years ago!

 

Last edited: Feb 28, 2025

will do..

I wanted to get it stable and functioning, before I dug into using it for audio work. Digging into the driver problem was great because I found some really interesting Youtube vids on not just Mint, but audio and music making in Linux. I didnt know some vendors are providing native linux drivers for their gear, so that was handy as well as understanding the audio stack and how alsa and pipewire interact.

I have downloaded reaper but haven't installed yet, probably this weekend I'll get to it.

I enjoyed watching an older woman explain linux audio mixers to me

Andrea Borman

and this cat does a good job of explaining linux audio stack

and here's an interesting take on using linux for music

 

older laptop circa 2015, dell Precision d5510
32gb ram, sata ssd 512gb, nvme ssd 500gb
1080p screen. no native ethernet port, it came with a usb dongle that was recognized by linux no problem.

laptop came with a windows10 pro license. but I want to get off the microsoft merry go round.
i'll keep one windows11 laptop (not this one), once I get a good distro installed, for state tax forms and other corporate bullshit, but I probably won't even boot it once or twice per year.

its an i5, can't remember the cores off hand. using my old windows7 for this post, I still need to move my bookmarks over to the Mint laptop...

It was very easy to do the Mint thing. I ordered a set of usb3 thumb drives it was a 5pack in different colours to make bootable system images. I did Windows7 first as I have a mini ITX intel board I want to try as media center. Then I created a Mint image using the downloaded file the Mint site, and Balena Etcher to create the image on the thumb drive. Balena only works on win10/11 if you use the download on their site, if you dig in the forums their is a 32bit version that runs all previous windows version. Took me longer to find that then to download and burn the image..

its easy peasy to test your hardware once you have that bootable image and it runs fast enough that you can use it to watch vids on youtube etc. - without actually installing on your hard drive.

SamData (some chinese brand) never heard of, but they are usb3 and they do work well.

13$ for a 5 pack, you can use a sharpie to mark them with contents... the black one needs a paintstick.



https://www.amazon.com/dp/B092879BVB?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title&th=1

 

@Garamondo Furbish good stuff! not a shabby laptop hw spec to begin with though,
Balena Etcher is fine as bootloader, but I found Ventoy being way more versatile (you can then just throw multiple various images onto the stick, no flashing needed),
I'm slowly thinking about repurposing some old macbook (2012 or 2014) as Linux machine, Mint always used to be fine, but another option for me would be installing Proxmox as portable virtual machine host heh

 

You might as well go all type 1 hypervisor, set up a Xen or a Qubes OS machine while you're at it!

 

Mint (Mate version) wasn't a great experience for me long time ago when I tried it. At first it seemed great, but soon after doing updates programs started to break. It became obvious to me that they didn't check/test updates thoroughly and that is very important in every OS (Microsoft fails sometimes too! lol). That made me stick with Debian because Debian team is veeery thorough and since I installed this Debian linux 12 years ago it never failed ever. Not even one update broke anything. It's so stable and so nicely working it made me lazy and forget how quirky OSes can be.

Since 2013 I've been doing "rolling updates" of Debian 7 "wheezy" regularly and I'm on Debian 12 with MATE DE now. No complaints at all.

 

distro I was using switched from Slackware to Debian at almost the very same time frame. Talk about an immediate difference, installing without having to play with LiLo. Was that because of the sharp increase in Debian popularity due to Ubuntu? I remember people joking about the Ubuntu installer coming with a free Che Guevara t-shirt. I was just happy to be rid of Slackware.

 

The last time I used Windows for making music I was using Windows XP.

edit: but I do use the side-laptop with W7 and now W10 for some plugins over ReaStream. I light a candle for ValhallaDSP to make Linux plugins every time I do it. I really miss Valhalla plugins. Wish Sean Costello turned a Linux fan soon.

 

Last edited: Feb 27, 2025

Slackware is in the same vain with Arch. Not for the faint of heart. Or rather - not for those who are trying to make things done. I've absolutely nothing against any distros, they will teach you how to do things in Linux, the Linux way. People who come from Windows fail to see the usefulness of distros like that. Once you install Arch or Slackware and enjoy using it, you become a Linux Jedi.

 

To master Gentoo, you have to compile the Force first. I like Debian better. You can just apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade it from the repo.

 

Yep, definitely the way to go.

Yes!!! That was the main reason for me too! I thought the best way to go was start using Linux for day to day business and keep windows for my music. It turned out that Linux was very good and I could already start very soon with using Linux for my music as well. Great thing about Linux: whenever equipment is class compliant (and a lot is!), it just works under Linux. My printer, my keyboard and my soundcard: no problem. I must admit that running a Kontakt library was a real challenge: a lot of xruns prevented me from playing piano. I had a lot of help from the Reaper forum to get things running. My experience with making music in Manjaro is however better. With two simple settings it runs a big Kontakt library without choking. The CPU is the bottle neck. But as I already said: I would never recommend Manjaro (or Arch Linux) to a beginner. I learned a lot from using MX21 in day to day business. Especially with learning that there almost always are free alternatives for windows programs. I bought Total Commander, WinRar and a video program, just to learn that there are free alternatives in Linux!
Overall I cannot see why so many people still use m$ stuff when all they do is email and webbrowsing. But if that was my only worry.....

 

Basic users don't know about Linux and all that MS shit stuff. It's enough for them to turn on PC and press beautiful icons

 

The consumer mindset, means, they approach the operating system as being built for them to use their computer. They don't understand, its a cage they climb into and become a prisoner, and the operating system is a club used to continously extract money and time from them.

I say this coming from the time when operating systems would fit on one 5.25 floppy disk (and still took 2 minutes to boot up). Watched the destruction of so much innovation into a duopoly of ms/apple. I was lucky I ran an Xenix system for a few years and became familiar with the unix/linux file structure, and operations. It made it easier to take so much of the microsoft propaganda with a grain of salt. I knew a single computer of modest means could support multiple users. I saw how microsofts software hogs resources, and forces you to use their kludgy adoptions of computer standards.

I've never seen microsoft's efforts as graceful or well executed, and I think their history of patches upon patches and hacks upon hacks, will more than show their ineptitude. Microsoft was a great business, in it understood it had to destroy all competitiors to dominiate the market. It did it by strategy and business connections, not by having a superior product.

so now we are left with a domininant company, Microsoft, with a very shitty product. There is only so long you can polish a turd, before people realize from the smell alone, what they are dealing with.

Microsoft is losing the personal computer users, they can hold onto the business and corporate users for awhile longer. In the end Microsoft will have to become a much smaller company, they can no longer innovate (not that they ever were particularly good at that either, they had to buy all their web browsers as they couldn't build it inhouse)

 

@Garamondo Furbish If you don't have sound you need to install two applications from the software manager:

pulseaudio
qasmixer

With these applications you can set the sound output very easily

 

the problem is the new kernel removes the hardware driver, so pulseaudio etc only get nothing. Using the older kernel (the standard kernel in the mint download) works perfectly. I can wait to update the kernel til they get it worked out, everything else works fine and I just reverted to the old kernel.

 

Shouldn't Mint/Cinnamon use pipewire-pulse (replacing pulseaudio) for it's audio plumbing these days? I mean, as the low-level audio server? What does pactl say?

As I only follow Linux audio cursorily these days maybe I'm confusing it with another distro here. But it really should be the default.