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Any fellow Linux users on here?

tkcartoonist said:
Anyone have any experience with AV Linux? I'm thinking of installing it or a similar distro (audio production related) onto a computer for a friend of mine who's into making music, but I don't think she has much Linux experience. Should I go with a different, more mainsteam distro (Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, etc) with audio-production-related repositories/packages instead?
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I had not even heard of that distro. Had to look it up. Though I know there are an insane number of Linux distributions out there, from mainstream to totally obscure.

Agree though, you're in a bit of a quandry with a musician without experience with Linux. If I were in such a position, I'd likely suggest installing Linux Mint, Ubuntu or Zorin OS mainly given they are high-profile, mainstream Linux distributions particularly recommended to new users previously experienced with only Windows.

Perhaps once she's comfortable with Linux then you might recommend a more specialized distro like AV Linux.
 
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As much as I like Linux for certain tasks, audio production on it is an absolute nightmare. Even with a dedicated DAW or IDE that's optimized for it (Renoise, Deflemask, PlugData, Bespoke, VCV, Sonic Pi, etc) you're still looking at a buttload of problems that need to be fixed by the user 99% of the time. Raspbian on a Pi might be the only exception for a few of the aforementioned due to standardization and driver issues being solved out of the box, but otherwise.

Familiarity with both linux and audio production is a bare minimum if you're going to combine the two, IMO
 
Also, don't get me started on VST support. I wouldn't trust yabridge to glue my VST and CLAP plugins to the host DAW but that's just one person's opinion. And, it depends on just how reliant on plugins they are -- mostly everyone I know would have a really bad time with that, but for a beginner musician it's probably less of an issue.
 
FilterFreq said:
As much as I like Linux for certain tasks, audio production on it is an absolute nightmare.
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Audio production is not something I have any experience with but I found a guide for choosing which Linux to use for audiophiles.

Choosing the right Linux distribution with a low-latency kernel is key. It unlocks your audio equipment’s full power.
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Best Linux Distro for Audiophile: Top Choices

Some people don't like hearing this but tough luck, Mint isn't in it, nor are any of the other sub branches of the mainstream distros. Ubuntu, Fedora or Arch. And Arch is only for people that like compiling almost everything from scratch themselves.
 
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FilterFreq said:
As much as I like Linux for certain tasks, audio production on it is an absolute nightmare.

Familiarity with both linux and audio production is a bare minimum if you're going to combine the two, IMO
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Fair point to make. In certain "niche" specialties, there are still some types of programs that have no Linux equivalent beyond what is offered primarily through Microsoft or to a lesser degree, Macintosh. Finding an equivalent in Linux may or may not happen for people.

If it weren't for Wine versions 6 through 9 making a 27 year-old version of Photoshop to function better in Linux than Windows 10, I might not have made the transition permanent.

Even then as a "mainstream" distro, it's clear that for me, Linux Mint can be pretty ugly at times when it comes to Nvidia drivers cooperating with kernel updates. And when you get into specialized audio programs as others posted above, expect mixed results using those mainstream distros. But in this scenario there are two major issues which appear to be mutually exclusive:

1) Using audio programs that meet a user/musician's particular requirements.

2) Understanding Linux as a completely different operating system from Windows or Mac.

A distro like Mint 22.0 is a good start, but not if extensive audio programming is a must. As previously stated by others, attempting both at the same time....is not recommended.

Unless of course that one has plenty of hair to pull out every time a driver misbehaves, especially when a kernel or video driver is routinely updated. For me this has been the biggest price to pay for transitioning from Windows to Linux.

For me there's no contest between Linux and Windows. But it's not a trouble-free journey given constant driver and kernel issues, made abundantly clear through Linus Torvald's middle finger consistently pointed directly at Nvidia.
 
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If she's unfamiliar with linux it probably doesn't matter. If she is familiar with a particular flavor of linux, I'd stay with that and get the add-ons.
 
Ironically just getting sound from my external speakers was the first real issue I had installing various Linus distros, both Ubuntu and Arch based ones. Had to do some real digging to find the solution to my Intel/Realtek audio hardware and software.

Headphones worked right from the installation. However those same installations didn't even recognize my audio jack, apart from the speakers attached. First thing I had to do was to "retask" my audio jack using the alsa-tools-gui, followed by added lines of code in
three different files:

1)sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save (change value to "0")
2)sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save_controller (change value to "NO")
3)etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf (add line: options snd-hda-intel power_save=0 power_save_controller=N)

It all made me wonder if most users default to external audio relying on their HDMI port rather than a built-in 3.5mm audio port on their motherboard. All quite annoying given nothing has been done about this all the way back to Mint 19. But then it also happens to every distro I've tried. Go figure.
 
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Outdated said:
Audio production is not something I have any experience with but I found a guide for choosing which Linux to use for audiophiles.


Best Linux Distro for Audiophile: Top Choices

Some people don't like hearing this but tough luck, Mint isn't in it, nor are any of the other sub branches of the mainstream distros. Ubuntu, Fedora or Arch. And Arch is only for people that like compiling almost everything from scratch themselves.
Click to expand...

I'm going to unintentionally open up a can of serious nerdery here, but contrary to popular belief, most musicians are actually not audiophiles or audio enthusiasts in the slightest, even though it seems like they almost should be. That's not to say that they don't enjoy their music, but their listening experience is usually just a pair of studio monitors (the flattest and seemingly dullest thing you could imagine) in order to analyze mixes, which usually doesn't cost them much of anything extra.

Getting music production setups up and running on Linux has become a strange sort of joke among the audio production community, because in theory everything should totally work, but in practice, we're all hanging by a thread on Windows as it is all the time, usually one second away from a devastatingly irrecoverable crash. Actually, it's kind of a wonder how some complex songs even get made -- but with the intricate detail needed to get even basic drivers up and running, the whole 'linux audio production' thing usually falls apart with just a few wine / ybridged plugins (which are almost always needed at some stage, unfortunately).

Or, god forbid a developer doesn't use a lot of automation and nobody beta tested it either (oddly, more common than you'd think), so when you go to actually automate a filter cutoff or volume fade, you just get 'obscure' crashes because unfortunately, a lot of people don't know what they're doing and it's hard for humans to juggle multiple things so passionately -- without a large corporate dev team (unfortunately), things just never work the way musicians are expecting.

With that said, this article might challenge me to actually try to get my livecoding setup running on Linux, which would be an extremely minimal ordeal in the audio production world, but would feel like moving mountains :D
 
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I also have an ongoing issue on multiple setups where the DSP summing just falls apart when listening to Spotify or Youtube music and doing tasks like coding or web browsing simultaneously, almost like the audio threads have to specifically pause while other things compute. There's something very oddly un-streamlined about the digital signal processing going on with Ubuntu and Mint (others could be fine, and I'm perfectly open to the possibility) and stock sound cards found in desktop PCs. I still haven't figured that one out, but it's a weird puzzle.

To its credit, I really like Linux lately for coding. It's kind of a workhorse for things that don't require a GUI, creating your own toolchains and all of that stuff. I can't praise Linux enough for what it gets right, and I really don't know what the world would do without it. It's a true unsung hero of the computing world
 
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FilterFreq said:
....usually falls apart with just a few wine / ybridged plugins....
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As soon as I saw the mention of Wine I felt your pain. I managed to work out a system that lets me play a lot of games but by no means all of them. I've spent countless hours playing with it and if you get something to run it usually runs well but if it has problems you can spend many frustrating hours getting nowhere.

FilterFreq said:
...without a large corporate dev team....
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That's why I stick to Ubuntu and Fedora. It's also why I never use the latest version of Wine but instead stick to whatever the OS dev team has tweaked for their system. Mismatched development libraries can lead to all sorts of problems.

FilterFreq said:
With that said, this article might challenge me to actually try to get my livecoding setup running on Linux, which would be an extremely minimal ordeal in the audio production world, but would feel like moving mountains :D
Click to expand...
According to everything I've just read there shouldn't be any problems with this. The only issue people seem to keep having is that they don't know they have to change permissions on the downloaded installer file to mark it as Executable. Right click on the file, go to Properties then Permissions, tick the little box that says "Make file executable". Then just double click on it the same as you would in Windows.
 
Outdated said:
According to everything I've just read there shouldn't be any problems with this. The only issue people seem to keep having is that they don't know they have to change permissions on the downloaded installer file to mark it as Executable. Right click on the file, go to Properties then Permissions, tick the little box that says "Make file executable". Then just double click on it the same as you would in Windows.
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What's interesting is that there's even a specific IDE that's tailored to Raspbian setups (which should be the easiest route imaginable), but the back engine (probably Supercollider) always has trouble getting in touch with Pulseaudio, and there's usually a lot of audio crackling. Eventually the threads spin out and it tells you that's where the issue was.

The programs all technically run just fine, but they can't take the minimum amount of stress required to actually make the most basic music imaginable with them, and then the threads die out and you have to try again.

That's about as far as I've gotten, even with the prepackaged stuff that's supposed to run with no fuss. It doesn't seem to matter if I'm running an SBC, desktop, laptop, or anything. And these are the setups that don't warrant any plugin use or anything external, so it remains a huge mystery to me. I always thought it would be fun to have a very minimal setup like this, but it seems like Supercollider (which mostly everything uses as the backend) doesn't like Pulseaudio, but the two are theoretically supposed to be able to coexist.

I might need to look into other forms of handling audio, like piping Supercollider into something else. For all I know, just a few weird tweaks might have it all sorted, but first I need to probably understand the entire audio / DSP pipeline. It's fun in a weird way, but these are just a handful of those strange issues that crop up!
 
So what I did was installed Linux Mint, then I installed the UbuntuStudio-Installer package to install audio-related packages (Ardour, LMMS, guitarx, etc) plus a low-latency kernel and pipewire. That seems like a good place to start.
 
tkcartoonist said:
So what I did was installed Linux Mint, then I installed the UbuntuStudio-Installer package to install audio-related packages (Ardour, LMMS, guitarx, etc) plus a low-latency kernel and pipewire. That seems like a good place to start.
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Good deal. Try to make as many audio apps default to Pipewire as you can. Better quality and less problematic than how Pulse Audio used to perform in Mint.
 
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