So sitrep:
Newish desktop
- i7-13700K
- 64Gb DDR5 6000Mhz
- RTX 3070Ti
- MSI PRO Z790-P (WiFi is not a factor, permanent ethernet connection.)
Needs:
- Gaming
- Music composing
- Coding (Mostly python)
- Video editing
I’ve been using Linux on and off throughout the years, but lately I’ve fallen out of the loop somewhat. Started with Slackware around 1998, Kubuntu in the 2000’s, Ubuntu 2010’s, Kali and Mandrake 2020’s -> on my laptop, Ubuntu server on my RasPi. At work, we have a few Fedora servers I have to maintain. So not a complete novice, but somewhat obsolete info.
I have been looking at the immutable distros, like Bazzite and Pop!_OS as I’ve done the whole song and dance of constantly repairing my distro because of various issues, and I’d like my main recreational machine & distro to be low maintenance, I get to fix linux servers at work enough already, I don’t want to bring that home.
With gaming, I’ve understood that linux has come a loooooong way since I last tried sometime around TBC Launch for WoW when Wine barely worked with it.
Music composing is a little annoying, since apparently both Ableton and FL studio are not an option. I’ve heard good things about Reaper, but I’ll have to do some more research. Feel free to educate me on this topic if you have some insider info. I don’t play live sets, just compose and mix.
Video editing, currently I use Davinci Resolve, and apparently it works fine on Linux, just some limitations and shenanigans with codecs. Alternatives are welcome, I don’t need 90% of what resolve offers, I can make do with a simpler software as well.
Thank you kindly in advance for departing thine wisdom.
For the music stuff, there’s also Bitwig and Ardour for good DAWs, Ardour’s free so that’s what I use. There’s yabridge for VSTs, though it’s hit and miss, and might be more tinkering than you want as you have to use an older version of wine. I’ve also heard about using carla for this purpose, but I haven’t messed around with that so I can’t attest to it’s usefulness. I use Arch for all this, so ymmv on Kinoite, I didn’t try any of it out when I was on Bazzite, but I can tell you that Bazzite was great for gaming!
Cheers for the music points. I got some pointers, that Nobara is great for music stuff, and Bazzite can be optimized for it, but takes some effort and fiddling. I gotta take a look at Ardour and Bitwig, see if I vibe with them. How are they with older (my keyboard is around 2010 I believe) MIDI devices, do you happen to have experience?
I don’t, unfortunately, I’m a guitarist primarily. I did see some MIDI stuff in the menus though, so I think it’d be fine? I think it’d probably depend on drivers, so you’d probably have to check if your device has Linux support, if it’s not just taken care of by the generic drivers. You might ask on linuxmusicians.com, they’re a great resource!
Thanks for the suggestion, bookmarked, will have a gander if I get stuck!