donuts

I love Evangelion. I don’t love this stupid bullshit.

Hardware wise, you’ll be hard pressed to find any even half-way popular computer that can’t run some form of Linux. So I’d say just get something that’s within your budget. Those x86 APU-based mini pcs that you can find for ~$200 are becoming pretty popular for projects these days. Something like a Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi or whatever might also be fine depending on what you want to do with it, just keep your power expectations in check. If you want to spend more money on something with graphics hardware, I’d recommend going for AMD over NVidia, just because the drivers are built into the kernel and essentially no-hassle.

When it comes to software, especially if you’re on x86, just arbitrarily pick one of the reasonably popular distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, PopOS, or any of the other ones you’ve probably heard of. One of the first things to learn about “Linux” is that there’s a whole ecosystem of software projects behind it, and there is a lot of overlap between the software that each distro runs. Yes, there are some meaningful differences between, for example, Ubuntu and Fedora, but I think they are much less meaningful to a noobie (who is just learning the basics of Linux) or an expert (who probably knows enough to bend and customize just about any distro into whatever they want).

Small caveat #1: If you prefer to have a desktop that more closely resembles Windows (like the one of the Steam Deck’s desktop mode) you might want to pick a distro spin that uses the KDE Plasma desktop. On the other hand, if you want to play around with something that’s a bit different than what you’re used to, it might be worth checking out a distro spin that uses the Gnome desktop. I can recommend them both for different reasons, so you might want to check out some videos of them to see what you’re more into before picking. (Other desktops are available, these are just the two big ones! So there truly are a ton of options to explore here if you want to.)

Small caveat #2: At this point in time are you more interested in stability or customization? If you want a truly rock-solid Linux system that’s hard to ever break, you might want to consider one of the new “atomic” distributions like Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite (or others), though you might find some of their limitations annoying. On the other side of the spectrum, if deep customization and flexibility is what you’re looking for, then you might want to venture into the deep end with things like NixOS or ArchLinux, just keep in mind that they can be very technical and overwhelming for noobs. Personally I have been using Fedora Silverblue for a couple years now and I love the stability of it, and I can work around it’s limitations with distrobox.

Another thing to consider is just using what you already have. For example, playing around with Linux in a virtual machine, setting up a Linux-based server on one of the popular VPS services, or just plugging your Steam Deck into a dock with a keyboard and monitor attached and playing with something like distrobox (which you can probably find a guide on how to set that up for your deck).

Microsoft basically tied with Apple for the title of richest company in the world, by the way.

Modartt’s Pianoteq is a nice Linux native, physically modeled piano plugin.

In my experience yabridge is fantastic. With a bit of initial setup, it’s the closest thing to a native experience that I’ve come across.

You do control it with a CLI interface, so you need to be comfortable with that.

You also need to have already installed the Windows VSTs manually using WINE or whatever, and so there’s a bit of a typical “how well does this work under wine” crapshoot and a bit of a learning curve there.

• AI “content” is trivial to make and will soon be everywhere.

• Nobody wants to read, watch or listen to AI generated “content”

Infinite supply, zero demand. Sounds pretty devoid of value to me.

Just in time for nobody to care.

:3

Oh so that’s what “French Vanilla” means…

Meh, to me BlueSky is really just the dude who made Twitter deciding he wanted to try making Mastodon too.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s certainly better than “X” at this point, but I prefer Mastodon and the Fediverse in every way. (Features, community, population, etc). If BlueSky was compatible with ActivityPub then it’d be easy to recommend, but it seems unlikely for now at least.

Here’s a great follow-up experiment: leave “X” and never turn back.

Introducing the new Apple MagicRAM©™!

1. If you’re calling for a specific reason, like ordering food or whatever, write down what you want (plus any questions you have) ahead of time.

2. If they ask you something that you’re not expecting or don’t understand, it’s ok to take a bit of time to think or ask them what they mean.

3. Practice your intro or write it down if you need to. Something as simple as “Hello, I’m calling to make an appointment with Dr. Jones”, or “Hi, I’d like to place an order”, or whatever.

4. And as a general anxiety tip, know that it’s always worse just before you do something. Most of the things we worry about never end up happening, and sometimes when they happen they aren’t that big of a deal.

5. Take a second to remind yourself that what you’re doing is super normal, and so is making mistakes or being a bit awkward. The people who you’re talking to are used to dealing with all different kinds of strangers on the phone, including a lot of people with anxiety, hearing/speaking problems, etc.

Should be gayer imo, maybe like rainbow wavy animated.

Uh, yeah… So, basically I use an ubuntu:latest (LTS) distrobox container which has:

1. Its own $HOME, specified using the --home parameter when making a distrobox container.
2. Wine-staging
3. Yabridge
4. Bitwig Studio 5 (the Linux .deb version, installed with dpkg to the default location)
5. A whole bunch of Linux native plugins (like Modartt Pianoteq, installed wherever but then with the .so’s symlinked into my ~/.vst dirs).
6. A whole bunch of Windows plugins (like an old version of Kontakt, SampleTank, AudioModelling SWAM, MODO Drum/Bass, etc.), installing in the WINEPREFIXES that live in the distrobox container’s $HOME. (I then use yabridge inside the container to bridge them all for Linux.)
7. I think I also have Pipewire installed inside the audio production container, but I can’t remember if that’s necessary or not.

Finally, I use the distrobox-export command to export Bitwig Studio to my host system, so I can run it as you normally would, just hitting the start key and clicking on the Bitwig icon.

So it’s kind of a complicated setup initially, but from day to day it’s really easy to use. I just open Bitwig, load up whatever Linux or Windows VST (the Wine ones take a little longer to initialize that I’d like but it’s not too bad), and just make music. :)

https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_tips.md#container-save-and-restore

I think I followed this. I think you have to do it through podman/docker (whichever your distrobox is using).

It almost just worked, but again I had to fix a couple of Wine symlinks to get all of my Windows VSTs working again… (I also had to reregister some VSTs in certain cases.)

Another unrelated but useful thing to look into wrt distrobox is distrobox-assemble, especially if you have a few different distrobox containers dedicated to different tasks. I could go on and on about this stuff, lmao.

I’ve heard good things about Studio1, but I haven’t tried it myself.

Oh yeah, and speaking of Distrobox…

I also happen to have all of my audio production software (DAWs, Plugins, Wine, Yabridge, etc.) living in an Ubuntu-based distrobox container, which has the added benefit of allowing me to export save the entire container and drop it mostly painlessly* onto a different machine. It’s really cool to be able to pick up my entire music making environment and bring it with me, but it might be a bit overboard for some people. I don’t have much of a choice other than to use distrobox since I run Fedora Silverblue as my daily driver. lol

*It doesn’t work flawlessly, because I sometimes have to fix some important Wine symlinks that break when doing this.

Yeah! Don’t sleep on it! I can say without reservation that yabridge is essential for me. :)

The basic yabrigde workflow is:

1. Install wine-staging and yabridge on your distro of choice.
2. Use wine to install all of your Windows VSTs somewhere. (I prefer to use a separate WINEPREFIX for each plugin maker, but that’s probably not fully necessary). If you don’t know much about Wine this can be a bit hard to wrap your mind around, but that’s another story.
3. Then you run yabridgectl add where all of your various Windows VST dll files are (instead of whatever Wine prefix you installed them in).
4. And then when you run yabridgectl sync yabridge will create a .so bridge library for each of your Windows VSTs and spit them out into ~/.vst3 or whatever.
5. Finally you point your DAW of choice to ~/.vst3 or whatever, and your WIndows VSTs should hopefully show up and work just like they do on Windows (with the usual caveat of Wine being pretty great but not always perfect).

Sadly there’s no good GUI frontend for it (that I know of at least), but as far as CLI tools it’s pretty easy to learn and use. Also, you may want to make sure that you’ve got realtime privilages setup on your system, and you can find guides to doing that in the yabridge wiki.

But yeah, I’ve got a bunch of Windows VSTs from Native Instruments and IK Multimedia and a bunch of others too, and they are work very well when bridged these days, so I’m able to use Linux for music without sacrificing anything.

I do gaming and music production on Linux without much issue at all these days.

Most games are pretty easy to work with these days thanks to Steam, Lutris, and Bottles.

As for audio, there are 4 key ingredients to my setup: Pipewire, Bitwig Studio, Wine and Yabridge.

Pipewire is pretty easy to use and works in a low latency setting just fine, so imo you no longer have to juggle PulseAudio + JACK.

Bitwig isn’t open source, but it’s fantastic and inspiring and supports Linux natively. They’ve also been great about stuff like the new open source CLAP plugin format.

I’ve found that Wine (staging) does a pretty reasonable job handling any Windows VST I’ve thrown at it, but it’s a bit of work getting it setup, especially if you’re new to the concept.

And finally yabridge is a great CLI tool for turning all of your Windows plugin .dlls into Linux .so, that you can easily use in your DAW of choice.

So if you want to do music production on Linux then definitely check out Bitwig and Reaper (along with Ardour, like you mentioned). And personally, I think that if you have a decent chunk of Windows VSTs it’s worth investing a bit of time learning how to getting them working in Wine and then bridged with yabridge.

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