Anyone on here running Linux as their main OS?
To cut a long story short: I need a new display (my 30" Cinema Display is way too past it) and I’d like to get a 4K one as I really like the retina display on my MacBook Pro. My current Mac Mini won’t support 4K and is also getting a bit old. So, hop on to apple.com and configure a new Mac Mini, then start cursing at the prices they charge for SSDs and 16gig of RAM. This get’s me thinking… does it need to be a Mac?
Really I’ve started to use my phone more and more for casual computing, and my computer is reserved for serious computing and web browsing. The only software I really run is Chrome, Mail.app, iTerm and Emacs. When I run Ableton, 9 times out of 10, it’s just as a glorified mixer. Everything else is command line, or easily done on my phone.
I’ve run Linux in various guises for 20 years or so. First version was from a cover CD in 1995 or 1996, I think it was Slackware (and I had no internet connection…). But I’ve never used it as my main desktop, OSX has generally offered me the best of both worlds.
I’ve managed to cobble together a little test computer sitting on my desktop next to my Mac to try out. It’s currently got Arch Linux on it with XMonad as the window manager. Debian has always been my choice on the server, but I’d like a rolling release (and testing always gets a bit wierd before a stable release). Plus PKGBUILD
s seem easy to write. I did try NixOS and I really like the concept, but it’s a bit too rough around the edges for me, and is sometimes too opinionated.
I think I’ve got my head around audio, basically I need to go PulseAudio -> JACK -> ALSA
, but I haven’t set it up yet, and more problematically my MOTU 828mk3 doesn’t look like it works under Linux. In all likelihood I’ll keep the Mac around for audio anyway.
So, who else is running it as their main OS, what distro, and how are you doing audio?