So I chose to install Ubuntu and Ubuntu studio on top (which as I understand is just adding a bunch of apps and maybe doing some configuring). I am a musician and visual creative. I’d like to know why I made the wrong choice in distro. Hit me with it!
Why is your distro of choice better than the one I picked at random for myself?
What bottleneck am I to expect due to my non archyness?
The biggest mistake one can make with Linux?
Using windows instead.
Ubuntu Studio is an excellent choice to get you
startedbusy doing your things. It’s a work of love, from passionate people, going at it for many years now.The only drawback is that the bundle is overstuffed, for my use case there’s just too much stuff in there lol (sound eng)
Enjoy yourself, test your creativity against the available tools, and make stuff. That’s the important part: making!
Yeah I’ve noticed that. Tryna work out how to delete most of them now lol. Cool to open them up and see what the are though
You made a great choice of distro for media creation.
Some background information and other options are below.
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Ubuntu studio is a distro targeted at creatives(audio, visual).
Ubuntu is touted as a ‘high ease of use’ distro, but as a company, it is a user-data collector and advertising injector.
For a similar audio/visual targeted distro, but one that is free/libre and includes no spyware or tracking, you could try Dynebolic.
Can be booted as a LiveUSB (or LiveDVD) to test.
* NB. Any hardware connected to your PC, that needs proprietary drivers, will probably not work because those drivers are not included in any Libre Distros.
Also NB, Dynebolic is made by friendly, neighborhood, activist, Rastafarians.
Users data collection… Eeeew. That’s why I’m leaving windows. I’ll have a look at dynebolic thnx. My audio interface already doesn’t like Ubuntu so far so I’m gonna have to get techie with it anyway
The first rule of Linux is that you always picked the wrong distro and here is why mine is better.
If it works for you then it’s good enough. Just focus on learning what you’re on and a lot of that knowledge will transfer to any other distro if you want to try others.
Totally agree with this and to add everyone’s tastes are different which is why there are so many different distros. It is true there are some tailored for specific things but no one distro is better then another. Any app you install on one can be installed on another
Exactly! Also many people especially early on, seem to think distros are vastly different. They’re really not, so much as they’re a different assortment of bits and pieces from mostly the same pool. Some things differ significantly across I wouldn’t say distros but across like, kernel bases? Like Debian, Arch, etc. The big thing is if it has 99% of what you wanted straightaway, then there’s nothing wrong with just using it, optimizing it for your preferences, and learning what distinguishes it, if you’re interested.
When I got a new laptop, I was psyched because it was not long after Debian had finally dropped that whole opposition to things that aren’t 100% open source, as of v 12. I like Debian but prior to 12 I often had driver issues. BUT: lo and behold, my laptop was so new that Debian didn’t have drivers for the audio yet. Nothing did except Ubuntu. They’re usually very quick to get stuff compatible, and so I installed Kubuntu so I could be on my fav desktop right off the start.
Now, quite some time later, Debian almost certainly has my audio drivers by now, but I’m not rushing to change because what I have works. End of story.
Whatever is working for you, enjoy it.
I went for Nixos (distro) with Plasma (desktop environment). Nixos has a great package manager (99% of the things there just work)and the way you install things is essentially having a list of your packages/apps. Deleting them is just as easy and the best part is that it’s totally gone, no lingering random files that could bite me in the future. If you mess up your configuration bad it’ll force you to stay the working version if you don’t like what you did you’ll revert it. Plasma has incredible defaults and you can click around in it to fine tune to your liking. Plug things into plasma is just works at least for me. I’ve plugged midi controllers, audio interface, dock, hdmi, game controllers first try no fuss. Oh I’m sure other distros have this as well but fun fact if your bt is on and the laptop is connected to a speaker you can just connect your phone (or any other bt source) and use your laptop as a bt speaker. And I mean it just works again. Yeah sure you need to pair it first. But boy oh boy Im playing on the tv and i can just bt to it and play my tunes like it’s nothing. Back to the question in hand. I have a windows version of Ableton 11 that I installed there with 3rd party vst 2 and 3 plugins figuring that one out took me longer but it was in front of me all the time so in hindsight that wasn’t too hard either. So that was my new generation Arch btw xD aka NixOS btw. The tl dr is that I find Nixos with KDE Plasma 6 having very friendly defaults that can be built on if and when you ready
Completely dodged the question to crow about nix. I’m 90% convinced nix users are the new “arch BTW” users.
What was the question then? Wasn’t it about the distro of my choice and how it handles packages specifically about media creation? I fell like you folks just saw nix decided “nah f this guy” but ok I get it. Ps.: Im self aware if you read the last few lines
You just went on about how easy nix is to configure, then about adding bluetooth devices, then jumped to installing ableton on windows.
Op specified they are a musician using a studio distro for studio tasks. You didn’t address any of that.
I get that you’re impressed with nix and want to share, and nothing wrong with that. But let’s at least stay on topic.
Ableton - Digital Audio Workspace MIDI - Musical Instrument Digital Interface Scarlette 2i2 - Audio interface
Compatibility,dependencies are the most important things when it comes to digital studio machines. At least that’s what my 15yrs of audio engineering experience taught me. Not sure how I didn’t addressed any of that my dude but if you wanna hate I’m here for it. You hate my choices for the sake of it I love yours for the same reason
New user comes to ask question about their distro: gets “use NixOS; it’s totally simple”.
Weirdos.
Dude I started with nixos. If don’t want to do your linux hackeroo just use the machine it’s no fuss but I know Im a weirdo. 😂🤷🏽♂️
Funnily enough I also used Ubuntu studio when I was distro hopping a lot more a year ago
Eh, every distro is trade-offs. There’s not a straightforward “better or worse”.
The worst mistake you could make? Making it hard for you to change your mind later.
So take notes on what you modify, try to keep your data/configs consolidated so you could easily migrate to a new distro, etc.
And ideally have your hardware set up so that you can try booting a new distro without losing your existing setup.
If you’re looking for a change, there’s AV Linux, which is also Debian-based. Might be worth checking out.
Av for audio video I presume. Thanks will look into it
The biggest problem of ubuntu is snaps.
However, if you’re into audio, you can install linux mint, which is ubuntu-based, and then install the ubuntu-studio-pipewire-something (sorry, can’t remember how the package is actually called), which FIXES pipewire to work properly with high end audio apps. For example, on my vanilla Linux Mint, Bitwig Studio would not make a peep! After installing that package, it produces sound. With that fixed, you can do everything on Mint.
Good choice, man. Good choice. I have Arch and Manjaro, they’re good, but there was a time when I was doing photography as a freelancer and I used Ubuntu Studio back then. The codecs are ready and instead of configuring, you can get to work.
My most used distro in the past few years is CachyOS.
Recently swapped to Bazzite because I got tired of the papercuts of running Arch. I also wanted to move to one of the official supported Distros that is supported by my laptop in case I ever need to make a support ticket.
Qubes or gtfo (troll answer, don’t listen to me)
I run arch on my laptop (btw), and Ubuntu server on my server. I like how reliable and stable Ubuntu server is. Gives me piece of mind.
I think everyone’s basically hit my complaints with Ubuntu. It’s a very bloated OS with a hard dedication into snaps, which I dislike(but I also hate flatpak so yea)
Being said if this is your first Linux distribution, you can’t go wrong with Ubuntu. It’s a very beginner-friendly distro. The only other one that I would have recommended aside from that would have probably been Mint. But Ubuntu is going to have quite a bit more tutorials and guides for it.
