Really want an honest answer here and not a full blown Linux cult answer.
I’m a new dad (kid is 1.5months old) who used to game pretty hard and do music production in cakewalk and ableton, but the crotch goblin is getting in the way. With windows 10 support coming to an end, I’m faced with a choice to either jump on the Linux train or take the safe way out and eat win11. Please keep in mind that I run a super clean machine (no porn (that’s what mobile is for) or tormenting or anything sketch) and have no intention of doing anything unclean. I have a lot of music prod data that I don’t want fucked and a steam library that I want access to but don’t really care about the data associated with them (saves, profiles…i could care less). So it’s really my ableton and Cakewalk files I want to keep. There was a time I college 2010-2011 where I borrowed a CS majors Ubuntu laptop for a few months to just get work done (just webbrowsing and office app stuff). Shit was annoying and difficult to understand but I was able to make it work-ish.
I’m savvy enough where I can adult Lego a PC together but struggle when it comes to software and troubleshooting and really don’t have the time for that stuff.
Basically, I’m not in the position right now to learn a distro and struggle around with all that crap and I need to keep my music shit. I also despise Microsoft and AI in general but I’m perfectly fine just eating it for simplicity. Is there a low effort Linux solution to my situation? Looking for automatic updates where I just click “express install i don’t fucking care” and im not searching for drivers every day.
My build is basically what’s shown below minus the SLI’d 1080s and with 32gbDDR4. Any upgrade apart from the gpu would essentially mean a wholesale at this point. I used the 2nd card to build my wife a pc since SLI is effectively useless now.
if you’re going to be too time pressured to have fun with Linux, probably don’t for now
The problem will likely be the warped perception of “low effort” users like you have, that I went in detail on here
This is indicated by phrases like these:
struggle around with all that crap and I need to keep my music shit
Which translate to me as “I don’t want to learn or change a thing, so tell me how I change the most fundamental part of my computing without doing that”.
As I wrote in the comment linked above, with an attitude like that you’d have a significantly harder time than some non-techy person who just wants to have a system that “just works” without preconceptions, not bother with the technical details, but is entirely open to using new programs and doing things differently, as long as they work reliably.
In your case, I’d say stick to Microsoft until you get your mindset and priorities straight. Because then you’d have an easy time without much tinkering at all. But as it stands I think you’d be setting yourself up for misery and failure.
If you’re going to have to change OS anyway you might as well try Linux first. I’m doing a trial run on Bazzite and so far has gone pretty smoothly with the gaming stuff. There’s other stuff I’m having to figure out but I’m pretty optimistic that I will not be putting Win 11 on my desktop.
I kept my ref # for 11, but yeah, Bazzite so far suits my needs. Just now really getting used to Linux, and learning as I go. OMV on an old machine for my NAS confuses me more admittedly. Only thing frustrating with Bazzite so far is the locked os. I would like to modify the menu scripts to include peazip options and extraction to Desktop as a menu item, but I can work around that and do things the longer way. Simple things though are pretty easy. Also sucks that I can’t get Doom Eternal to work on steamlink, but it’s of secondary use anyway. Bazzite is faster, no errors so far unless it’s something I tried to do to it. No RAM leaks like I experienced many moons ago with Xubuntu either (like 2015). I think it’s quite viable as an alternative now (especially since MS has lowered the bar so far)
Yeah so far the only weird issue I’ve had has been some apps will not open files from my file server when I click on the files in the file explorer. I can open them through the file>open function in the app but not the usual way I would do it. It’s something about the way the app is handling the smb:\ path. I found a github page with a suggested fix but haven’t had time to read through and parse what it is actually doing. That’s the only issue so far I was really annoyed by as IMO that’s something that should “just work”. As you said considering the pace windows is enshittifiying the Linux option becomes more viable every day, even if they don’t improve.
Stay on win10, if so the choice comes. Just get it debloated and maybe a better protection. If you are sure, get mint or other stable distribution, which I would recommend if you can have some spare time to figure out your setup. Most of the stuff should work out of the box
Go ahead and update to the newest spyware. 🤷♂️
Debian 13 comes out in a week or so. I have 1 fewer corporation spying on me.
Kick the can down the road. https://massgrave.dev/windows10_eol
I would suggest installing Fedora Kinoite, poke around it for 20-30min and if you find it too confusing then just putting windows back.
My point is that it’s not a big decision/commitment. And it’s trivial to undo!
Why not just fedora? All these Immutable distros seem like adding even more layers of confusing to someone new.
Really want an honest answer here and not a full blown Linux cult answer.
And so you ask in a linux community…
Not all of us have been absorbed yet. I’ve used Linux in passing for years, but only now have tried just diving on outright. Previously my issues were RAM leaks, having to run commands on a laptop on every startup just to initiate wifi, and WINE performance. The former seem to be fixed, the latter seems to be about 89% there with Proton (I even use it for nongaming). Lutris drove me nuts, so Ijust use Steam to do the hard lifting.
Hey there! I’m an avid music producer and gamer.
I made the jump to bitwig while I was still using Windows in 2019, and made the full jump to Linux as my daily driver late last year.
My mint journey was Mint (Cinnamon) > Debian (KDE Plasma) > Garuda (Dr4g0niz3d KDE plasma)
I think mint was great and I was still able to do a fair amount of gaming on it and Cinnamon desktop environment is very similar to windows so it’s not too big of a jump.
Debian was fine - I wanted to use Plasma as the desktop environment because I wanted a touch customization for how I can set up windows, widgets, and different desktop panels. I had issues with some games on this though.7
I like Garuda but I would not recommend if you’re not too familiar with tinkering and troubleshooting. In hindsight I probably should have gone with Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE plasma as its desktop environment). I have experienced some odd bugs with the desktop environment and I think it has to do with how nvidia and Wayland play with one another.
I haven’t had a game that didn’t run, the only odd bug I’ve had is some games won’t recognize my new soundcard from bitwig.
using WINE and yabridge I’ve gotten all my plugins to work seamlessly as well - and that includes Omnisphere which is a beast on resources.
I was really fed up with the direction that windows has been heading for quite sometime.
TL;DR: I think mint or some Ubuntu distro would be a good fit for right now, and any future GPU upgrades consider something from AMD.
Tldr, I recommend sticking with Windows or using two separate machines, one for music production running Windows, the other for running everything else with Linux.
Music production isnt great on Linux in my experience at least right now. If you use any paid plugins that are windows only, there’s a good chance they won’t run. I haven’t used ableton or cakewalk but I use reaper which has a native Linux version, and even that had a lot of issues. Anything with ilok is a no go, even plugins that dont, I had a hard time getting working or if they did work, they crashed A LOT.
Gaming and other general use has been fine for me, ive even done video and photo editing on Linux and been happy with it.
If you want the easiest experience, I typically recommend Fedora KDE spin or kubuntu. KDE is a desktop environment that is very similar to windows and highly customizable. You’d likely feel at home on it. Immutable distro might also be a good option if you really want the “IDC just do the update” path. Harder to break, easier to manage from what ive heard but I haven’t used them personally so maybe others that have can chime in.
I made a windows only box for music production and use Linux on my main PC. It runs windows 10 and is rarely connected to the internet except when I need it to be. If you wanna run Linux and make music, it can be done, but I had a terrible time with it and have given up for now.
So make a separate machine for music production and run Linux on your main pc or just run Windows is my advice. So far, this has been the best setup for me. I don’t worry about my privacy, I can make music when I want, and I don’t have to worry about incompatible plugins, crashes, stupid nonsense that gets in my way when i wanna make music.
Hello fellow reaper user. What do you think about sharing some Linux friendly plugins, what are your gotos?
I don’t have many Linux friendly plugins that i can share unfortunately. When I tried running reaper on Linux, most things I tried either didn’t run at all or crashed.
Best I had working was decent sampler. And even that didn’t work great for me:
https://www.decentsamples.com/product/decent-sampler-plugin/
Really cool project though, and lots of fun instruments to try on pianobook.
Thanks, I’ll try decent samples. As exchange, here my effects and instruments, which I selected for working good with Linux and Windows
effects
- TS overdrive
- TAL reverb
- Room reverb
- Mfm2 from u-he (they are the goat in my opinion)
- gdelay
- Flying delay
- Centaur
- Boyd
- Carve
instruments
- Tal arppadkeys
- OS251
- Monique
- TyrelN6
- TrippleCheese
- Podolski
Kick the can down the road and download the MASgrave Win10 script (I think that’s it, I don’t use windows) that puts you on the Long Term support - iirc that gives you until Jan 2027. That’s enough time to get through the zero parental sleep phase and be able to think clearly…
If that’s of interest I’ll dig the correct details out (ping me) or I’m sure someone else knows what I’m waffling about & will drop the link
From what I’ve heard of seen in the Linux community music production on Linux is not easy. There is a fair amount of tweaking to get audio working and connecting instruments.
bro just grab a cheap ssd and enclosure, install linux on that, slowly play around and setitup, if you like it eventually swap ssds or install it on your main one
I went through the hassle of dualbooting and accessing my drive through linux (not that much hassle but as a beginner it was), ended up uninstalling windows, but i had time to tinker, which is key to making me like it, I was okay with not having a usable pc and I learned what I needed/wanted as substitutes. If you don’t have time experiment on a side device or using an ssd, they are fairly cheap now, you could even use a cheap fast usb if you don’t mind it shitting the bed eventually.
damn could usbs be used as disposable os, i guess thats why tails is used that way, since its bad for the usb to use it that way, they are getting pretty cheap for the fast ones, idk why youd need a dispoable os you could lose at any second tho, maybe if it was very connected to a cloud service
Yes but don’t use it for anything valuable. USBs have a high failure rate when used for heavy read writes.
You can get USB enclosures for M2 drives if you want to go that route a bit more reliably. Ensure you use USB3 (which will still be slow but not as boneachingly bad as USB2)
I would say the biggest problem is the music production on Linux. Especially VSTs - those are still hit or miss. And unfortunately the DAWs you mentioned doesn’t have Linux support.
For example I was really trying to do music for several years on Linux, but in the end I gave up and now I’m dual booting Windows… 😿
Just gonna add that Windows 11 Enterprise IoT Edition is Windows 11 without all the bloatware, and it’s easy to get it for free from the massgrave.
