My first foray into Linux was something like twenty years ago, I ran Linux Mint briefly and happily, but I screwed something up trying to get flash videos to have sound and kind of gave up and went back to windows.
Flash forward, I got my desktop and my husband’s laptop set up with Mint now, and I can’t believe how easy it was. Everything has been working excellently, and the laptop is getting more attention than its had in years. The software manager is amazing, I got set up with steam and my daw (reaper) in no time. So far I haven’t run into anything I’ve tried to do that I couldn’t do with minimal elbow grease.
Thanks for being so passionate about Linux gang, I don’t know that I would have converted nearly so quickly if I wasn’t exposed to it here. Y’all are cool as hell.
Yeah it’s pretty sick
If you like Fedora over Ubuntu and want a great out-of-box experience, try this distro: Ultramarine Linux. It’s like what Mint is to Ubuntu.
Has been my daily driver for 5 or 6 years now. Loving it!
Welcome back, btw ;)
Mint “just works” in a way a lot of other distros don’t. The majority of Linux enthusiasts and users enjoy tinkering, and that’s fine – but people who want their stuff to “just work”, generally don’t like Linux because it expects you, the user, to fuck with it until it works. Mint doesn’t, and I adore it for this reason. You have any idea how floored I was the first time I went to print something and it just worked with my network printer, no bullshit involved? Or how my jaw hit the floor when installing a graphics driver was a two click install process, and nothing went wrong?
Yeah, Mint is rad as fuck.
Mint worked better with my printer than windows every did right out of the box.
Oh jeez I tried again after a bad experience with Ubuntu like 10 years ago. I imagine 20 was awful. And yeah Linux is really good now. I hate having to go into my windows partition, it’s more borked than my Linux.
It’s great. It’s exactly what an operating system should be like. It’s my first foray into Linux and I’m very happy with Mint.
The DAW is my last windows transition hurdle. I have been using Ableton for years so I’m dreading the change enough that I haven’t even really been looking. How is Reaper?
FL studio runs well under WINE, others may have more input on if/how Ableton runs.
Bottles is great for managing windows software/wine and has template for installing software with dependencies.
I could never get used to reaper, but ymmv as it is definately closer to ableton than FL.
Reaper is super rad! The scripts extensions are incredible and personally I’d have no issue using it for professional level use cases. And the licensing is so cheap!
VSTs are a minor problem but some can work under wine nicely, but this isn’t reaper specific
I’ll give a shoutout to a great resource, LinuxDAW.org. A still-being-maintained list of audio software that has an official linux version.
I personally use Bitwig but mostly do my noodling on my synths and never really record anything. I’m going to change that soon, I think.
Reaper is great once you get to know it. It does everything you need and more for recording and editing audio and midi (and some video).
For Linux specifically… It’s identical to the other versions, so you can download it to your current OS and try it out, if that’s what’s keeping you from switching to Linux. You don’t even need to install it.
Plugins is a different issue for Linux. Some people use Vine or such to use certain VSTis. Personally I’m on a mission to avoid that, so I only use free plugins native to Linux, and honestly, there’s not many. The stock plugins works fine, but they don’t have any fancy GUIs or particularly great default settings.
A word of caution: Reaper is very customisable. I would recommend reading at least parts of the manual to ensure that you understand how it’s “supposed” to be work before starting on some large project and trying to fit the square block into the round hole. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. I’ve seen lots of support posts where people describe their projects and even the helping replies are needlessly convoluted. If you know your way around a real mixer desk, you’ll find that every combination of sends, auxs and busses are possible in Reaper, so there’s really no need to stack up hundreds of tracks and effects and whatnot to achieve basic stuff. Just like every DAW it’s easy to get lost in the routings, so it makes sense to get a well structured flow from the start. Especially because it’s soo customizable.
Reaper is very stable, which is nice for live performance. I have only had crashes from dodgy plugins in Windows.
Unrelated to Reaper, my experience is that Linux works better than Windows when you have many USB midi controllers. Both Puppy and Mint recognized my ancient hardware straight out of the installation, no matter which port I use (unlike Windows).
Studio One, which i have been using for years, has a linux beta that does already work quite well. But only in a wayland Session which means… no 3rd party plugin GUIs. And no clue when this might change, maybe never. Probably a deal breaker for 99% of the target group. I really want to switch to Linux, but for Audio guys it can be a pain. Reaper rules tho.
I don’t use DAWs but i just recorded with a guy using Reaper. He had nothing but glorious things to say. You can run it from a usb stick of your using someone else’s studio. At one point he needed it to do something specific and just got in touch with the guy and asked and he sorted it. Apparently it’s the guy who made WinAmp.
I run Linux on my regular systems with an occasional dabble in reaper on it.
On the flip side, I run ableton on Mac for a couple of touring projects and could never move off of it.
Reaper is a fantastic tool, I’ve had a license for years and really respect what they’re doing. But if you’re doing anything besides home production for fun, it’s just not there yet.
I’m super amateur, I don’t know that I’m the best person to ask. Sorry! It meets my purposes for learning, but I’m not in the best place to judge if it has better workflow than ableton or anything like that. I can say I’ve been pleased with how intuitive everything is though, when I looked at lmms and amour or whatever the other Linux one is they were completely incomprehensible to me.
I just want a KDE variant without having to manually install it
If you want a Debian-based KDE, Debian works pretty well for me so far.
I’d have thought cinnamon was a key draw for mint and lmde given it’s overall familiarity with windows / user friendliness? Would kubuntu or the fedora KDE spin work here?
Regarding Kubuntu, I don’t like snaps and don’t want to have to worry about disabling them after every major update
Regarding Fedora, I really like aptitude and don’t want to give it up
Totally understandable. For whatever it’s worth, you can permanently disable and remove snap and snapd from an Ubuntu system (I had to do this recently with a raspberry pi 5). The amount of work to do this, however, may be practically equivalent to installing plasma on mint / lmde, but the guides on this are thankfully straightforward in case you’re ever interested.
https://www.baeldung.com/linux/snap-remove-disable
This works well in practice, and upgrades still work as intended. I may need to follow this guide again very soon, as nextcloud pi unexpectedly died on me. I’m thinking of flashing either Ubuntu or trying their Debian fork out again.
Stop using sd cards and your raspberry pi wont die on you again. Flash on a usb3 external ssd.
Debian lets you select KDE during installation.
Why is KDE more difficult to install than any other DE? Kubuntu, Neon, archinstall+KDE, etc…
Neon.
Neon is not a daily driver. Other people in the thread have suggested Debian KDE and Kubuntu
Sounds like all you want to do is complain. You have been given numerous options, and none of them are acceptable.
Was that directed to me or the one above me?
this is a true success story and I love to see it.
Mint is also my first dabble, it’s absolutely delightful
I don’t suppose you repeated the mistake of trying to get Flash working this time?
Glad it is working for you. There a lot of fascinating software options in Linux… but expecting to be able to run arbitrary Windows software on it is risky, so when you don’t drag your history with you it is usually a pleasant experience.
why would flash be a problem? for everything that’s not compatible with ruffle, i just run the standalone projector application in wine.
I don’t know… but it was what precipitated their last exit from using Linux, and it is a defunct, insecure platform that should be unnecessary these days.
i see. yeah, it should probably not be used for anything other than archival purposes, and even then it needs to run in a secure sandbox.
To be fair, that long ago the Internet felt like nothing but flash videos and flash games
And complete websites implemented in Flash. It is a dark time that I don’t like to talk about. The dreams, the dreams won’t leave me alone though, they still haunt me.
As much as I miss the early Internet, there’s some aspects better left forgotten.
Da email. Da email. Check check da email!
Good times, but right, right.
I had been wanting to switch back to linux now that I don’t need specific windows programs anymore. Finally convinced myself to go for Pop_OS! After a few hours of messing with settings and apps that weren’t quite right, I decided to go back to linux mint as it worked well for me before. So happy I made the switch. Completely on linux now. Only wish I could convince my husband to us it. Maybe one day…
