At the risk of jinxing myself I just wanted to share how happy I am with my latest installation.
For over a year my Dell XPS has run Ubuntu. It’s been, by far, the worst experience I’ve ever had with any computer and my very first computer had only 256 MB of RAM! Among the long list of issues I’ve had we’re freezing, unresponsive keyboard and touchpad, glitchy video, multicolor flashing screens, piss poor battery life, piss poor Wi-Fi stability, failure to properly suspend or hibernate, and battery levels suddenly going from 40% to 5%. I figured either Dell put some kind of poison pill into there laptop so you’d spring for one of their Linux preinstalled laptops or I just got a lemon (I did have to get the mobo replaced within a month of buying it).
I’ve been in the process of getting all of my personal files off of it and getting ready to reinstall Windows and sell it, but I figured it was worth one last shot with a new installation. My desktop has been running Bazzite and I’ve been really happy with it so I thought I’d try another spin-off (Bluefin, because my laptop isn’t well suited for gaming). Installation took a few tries but it’s been about 72 hours and I haven’t noticed any major issues! Battery life and Wi-Fi still seem a bit sad but I suppose that’s the hardware.
So anyway, I just wanted to say that one Linux OS can be wildly different from another in user experience. If you have the patience, go ahead and try out something new if you’re just not feeling the OS that you’re on. It could make a world of difference!
Despite my issues with Music production, I’m still glad I switched to Linux. I don’t have to worry about my PC shutting off randomly to do updates, I can install whatever software I want, no one spies on me, I’m loving it for all those reasons.
I am giving up on making music in Linux, but aside from that, everything else will be done on my main machine. I’m making an offline only Windows box specifically for music production and nothing else. No internet access. It will only access my local network for file transfer.
In short, totally agree, but I paid money for Windows only VSTs years ago before i switched and they sound too good man. Also Reaper keeps crashing with native linux VSTs so really not here for that.
If you can do everything on Linux, that’s great. Its just less stable and polished for creative work IMO.
Let’s talk about that!
I was running Mint 21.3 using THIS script (tutorial) and it was incredible! It one-stop turned my (rather powerful) computer into an audio workstation. I just installed Bitwig and couldn’t have been happier. All my VSTs worked with Yabridge, which came with the script. It was super snappy and my projects where huge! I edited big projects in Davinci as well.
Then I switched to Mint 22, looking forward to using PipeWire and … it’s not great. I have latency and my old projects stutter. I feel like in missing something but I don’t know what it could be. Davinci is giving me errors as well, so can not use it right now. Need to look into it, don’t want to. It’s frustrating, but I don’t want to downgrade!
Preach man, Fedora worked great for everything except the COPR for yabridge was no up to date and you had to go through command line hell to get it to work. I switched a while after that to PopOS which I use now.
I’m a fairly capable tech guy, but I’m an artist. I wanna make music at 3 am when I have a song stuck in my head, not troubleshoot.
Yabridge works on my install of PopOS, but the VSTs that I use just don’t work except for one. And I spent around $300 on them collectively over the last 9 years or however long its been.
Also annoying that I can’t look at YouTube at all while Reaper is open. Straight up won’t play the video. Not great when I’m trying to troubleshoot why a VST isn’t working and I have to close the program I’m trying to troubleshoot.