Linux on the desktop

[driedstr]

Omg how did I miss this thread. Been using linux desktop for years, recently very impressed by pop os, excited about PipeWire, spending a lot of time in purr-data, learning rust to hopefully make some better utilities for us Linux audio people.

[sakul]

Woah this look super awesome thanks for sharing!!

I recently made the switch to linux at work, with the intention of getting into tiling window manager. Got pretty far with a POC of using xmonad with a minimal bar on top of fedora (bypassing the desktop environment), but still some system things had to be ironed out. Ditched Fedora and now using Ubuntu with gnome because of lack of time in the summer. Pop shell looks like best of both worlds. Can’t wait to try. Really really love tiling (or kinda hate floating, working around that with keyboard shortcuts to snap windows, but yeah, extra steps).

[charlieroberts]

sorry if this comes across as complaining… really looking forward to making this switch but am not super excited about elementary so far. My main question is: do I need to try another distro or are these types of configuration problems going to be omnipresent and I just need to suffer through them? I’m running elementary hera on a 2015 MBP.

1. Took me an hour to get wifi to work
2. Took me another hour to get something that approximates dark mode (but isn’t perfect)
3. Not much luck on gestures so far… I need pinch-to-zoom to work basically, but after installing libinput / gestures and configuring I’m not getting much luck.
4. No webcam out-of-the-box
5. Scrolling via the trackpad is poor (some tweaking improved this, but it’s still not great)
6. Always using discrete graphics (but at least discrete graphics seems to work!)

Should I keep powering through with elementary? Try regular Ubuntu instead per @tehn’s earlier comment? Thanks for any thoughts.

[john-smith]

Regarding dark mode: the team is working on it for OS6 (along with customisable accent colours ) and LibHandy is being integrated for better gestures. The elementary blog is worth a read, really excited about elementary OS 6

[papernoise]

Never had an issue getting wi-fi to work, but I guess that depends highly on the chipset and how developed the os driver for it is.

[vehka]

I’m under the impression that MacBooks from recent years have poor support for open-source drivers…

[driedstr]

I’d try Ubuntu (or an Ubuntu derivative) on a live USB. My 2013 MacBook Air runs Ubuntu pretty well, with a few caveats I’ve worked around. Here are some thoughts:

1. I had the same thing, but once I got it sorted, that was it and it worked fine.
2. I’m no help for Elementary, but with Gnome you can change the themes and be done with it. (Actually if you’re sticking with Elementary you might want to look into setting the GTK+ theme, which may fill in some gaps for apps that don’t seem to be respecting the system them.)
3. Most gestures on Linux are based on triggers rather than continuous movements. Gnome on Wayland has nice continuous workspace switching with four-finger-drag, however, and I’m (rather casually) working on a three-finger drag solution (or two). Regarding pinch-to-zoom in particular, do you want it system-wide or in a particular app? If system-wide, I’d check accessibility settings (unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be available in Gnome). Otherwise, it’ll be a case-by-case thing.
4. There is a kernel module I installed on my MBA which worked reasonably well, unfortunately I don’t have the computer handy to get the name of it.
5. Touchpad experience on Linux is a whole thing. People are on it though and libinput is probably what you want to be using.
6. No personal experience with GPUs but it should be possible with the right driver.

Other than that you’ll want to make sure the fan is running correctly (I had to install macfanctld) and you might also consider earlyoom.

Hope that helps!

[charlieroberts]

Liking Ubuntu so far, despite a nasty bug that wouldn’t let me log in when I first installed it. Wifi “just worked” and dark mode was one click. Still no webcam or pinch-to-zoom but I already feel more comfortable than I did with Elementary. Definitely prefer the Ubuntu aesthetics as well, which I was somewhat surprised at given that this was supposed to be a focus of Elementary, but I guess such things are somewhat subjective. Thanks for all the advice!

[faded]

pretty easy to play bandcamp using the same kind of system. i just type bandcamp album-URL with a little function (alias) i made. Basically, I get the URL via youtube-dl and then play the stream with mplayer. I’m using fish shell so here is my fish function to stream bandcamp in the command line.

[andrew]

this led me to some googling

scriptkittie/bandcamp-api

… interesting …

[tehn]

i know i’m doing it right when using macos starts to feel awkward due to fading muscle memory

currently enjoying swaywm

[neauoire]

Migrated to Linux just over a year ago, and I can’t imagine going back at this point. I didn’t really get it until I read The Art Of Unix Programming, that really gave context to the design choices, and helped me transition away from OSX. I currently use the i3 community edition of Manjaro, and I couldn’t be happier.

I attacked this transition head on, I knew that I would have to re-learn everything, or be miserable. It was a painful year, lots of hurdles, the little victories made it worth it. I transitioned to Linux at the same time as a few friends, so we could help each other, I’d recommend that, having people to bounce off ideas that are at your same stage of learning made this whole thing a lot more fun.

[kbra]

Finally moved from Mac OS on MacBook Pro to Linux on a generation or two old Lenovo X1 Yoga at home during this spring. Both for sake of change and because got a bit weary of where Mac OS is heading after a decade or two of use.

First on, I used a very minimalist self configured Manjaro + i3 environment for a couple of months. Initially I was enamoured of the simplicity and the speed of just doing pretty much everything with keyboard shortcuts and nothing extraneous on the way, but ultimately it started feeling a bit too spartan and awkward. A tiling WM was very cool for basic web browsing, programming, TUI + command line tools etc., which is probably everything a certain type of user ever needs - but every time I needed to do something I hadn’t done before / for a while, or use an app heavily reliant on certain aspects of window management, it usually required a whole new heap of configuration or figuring out how to do it best.

Now running latest Kubuntu LTS with KDE Plasma and a bunch of i3-like key shortcuts configured, and so far after a couple of weeks it feels like a happy medium - KDE has certainly come a long way from what it was about a decade ago when I tried it more extensively the last time. Installation took about 15 minutes, zero extra configuration needed with the computer and peripherals, both terminal and desktop’y apps work as one would expect them to and it still looks clean & calm and works fast.

Finally my experience of “Linux on desktop” has turned quite overwhelmingly positive - both the previous spartan environment and the current “everyone can do it” one.

[fourhoarder]

I set up Raspian on a Pi3b+ and it has been, well, great. i trend toward superlatives, but in comparison to a lot of my electronic/synth projects it was incredible to follow the instructions and have everything. just. work. ok, ok, so VCV doesn’t run yet, but wifi, Orca, Druid, SunVox, USB audio and midi interfaces…everything I’ve wanted to do works exactly as intended and totally defies the Problematic Linux stereotype. I have been spoiled installing all this stuff and now if something doesn’t have a command line install I grumble. This now exists as a little Monome and synth computer that sits to the side of the Mac laptop I run Reaper on, and does so absolutely silently, which is mind-blowing in itself. I have to think I will eventually move Reaper over as well, would be curious to hear people’s experiences with that, although I suspect they’re here if I search for them. But just wanted to thank everybody here for the Linux integration, it makes doing anything on Mac seem more and more needless.

[abalone]

still rockin’ linux on this lenovo x230 from 2012
got manjaro working, inspired by @neauoire
switched to linux mint xfce when I wanted to join the flok server
and it wanted cabal, not stack for haskell tidal install
(even though the super-cool Argentines offered to switch up the server for me, gracias)
linux mint works really great! :even has "dark mode
https://www.instagram.com/p/CHX-NLgBK3w/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

[shagia]

I’ve been switching from a hackintosh environment to a linux environment every other year as a consistent hope to be able to consistently do everything on it full time, and although I manage to spit something that’s ‘commercially’ feasible out every time with Bitwig, there’s always something missing that I end up going back to MacOS for, but the bright side is the reasons are getting smaller every time I reinstall.

It’s very cool to see some VSTs in a usable, stable state using bridges like LinVST. SoundToys plugins don’t burp, the GUIs are unfortunately slow but the performance is fine. Spire runs 90% fine, the context menus are disgusting but that’s more on the end of Wine itself I guess. Valhalla Audio’s VintageVerb does fine too, there’s a few more I can list off that works fine but a lot of my ‘sound design’ plugins are native to Linux anyway. My most stressful gripes are interfaces.

At the moment I’m using a MOTU Traveller via Firewire and I just can’t stop it from locking up and returning a ton of xruns in very random moments, and sometimes in expecting moments (I unzip a file, I launch a game, etc). I’m always reading it’s a ‘load’ issue but even when dumbing my environment down to a simple Openbox WM with zero extras, xruns, sometimes even when idling. I’m realizing that the firewire chip I’m using isn’t helpful (it’s a VIA card) but the state of it’s FFADO support just doesn’t seem positive without MOTU’s blessings anyway, so I think I’m choosing to just simply drop MOTU altogether. There’s a native in-kernel driver too but my performance is worse there

It’s a shame that more ‘linux compatible’ interfaces with more than 4ins and outs doesn’t seem financially feasible but I’m frankly ready to bend my setup just to have better linux stability. Currently eyeing a Cymatic Audio uTrack24, probably the cheapest but most featured option that suits my needs (has the option to install a 3 adat in and out card!!), Focusrite 18i20 3rd Gen which currently has a working driver in development, or save money to go the full way and get a RME HDSPe card, preferably the RayDAT.

All of this is such a huge difference than when Bitwig first released and I decided to give Linux a very honest run. I miss photoshop but my MBP is coming a proxy for it anyway, Blender and Davinci Resolve make up for it tho. I think the most shocking thing is Wine being capable of doing what it does and manage to keep stable, not forgetting to mention the work Codeweavers and Valve have been doing for both software support and gaming. The progress has kind of made me consider dropping JS for C++ & JUCE in order to contribute to Linux DSP but I’m still wrapping my mind about what to start reading in order to go that route.

[widdly]

This is a low cost way to get 8in 8out via Adat. It appears to work in linux but not officially. Might be worth a try?

USB Audio Streaming : USBStreamer B

[ngwese]

@widdly

This is a low cost way to get 8in 8out via Adat. It appears to work in linux but not officially

I have one of these but I don’t use it with any regularity. I bought it several years ago to use sending audio between a desktop and an iPad. Given that it worked on an iPad (as a class compliant audio interface) I would expect it to work on Linux without much issue.

[kbra]

Thanks for the experiences regarding LinVST. I run Bitwig with some Linux native plugins (thanks U-He etc.) and one big thing I’ve been missing is the Valhalla plugins. Seems like it’s time to try out the wrapper route if they actually work well.

IME class compliant USB 2 interfaces + the various tweaks offered by Ubuntu Studio setup (eg. low latency kernel patches & various small system settings that you can naturally replicate with any other distro) seem like quite a good bet for relatively worry-free audio. With the caveat that I’m no longer what you would consider a “discerning power user” so I’m not shooting for the absolute minimal latencies (those were the RME days…), just that I can trust audio not to lock up and glitch randomly before I push the system too hard.

Otherwise I was kind of in the same boat as you - jumping between Mac OS and Linux every now and then and ultimately staying with Mac OS due to some important applications and general smoothness of experience. Now, after a couple of years since late Spring it’s kind of the other way round: the Linux setup I have actually feels somewhat smoother for my general “casual” use. And due to focus shifting to development and exploration instead of getting “commercially feasible” (in the loosest sense of word) results, I find I have a very good toolkit on Linux side of things. I still miss eg. Logic for the workflow (Bitwig / Reaper don’t quite cut it for the same kind of compositional freedom for me) but as that’s no longer the main tool of trade, it’s not a big problem.

(I do still use Mac OS for online service development at work - would mildly prefer to switch to a good Linux laptop there as well, but I still like Mac OS as well, and that’s what’s easily supported in the company environment…)

[randomer]

Hey, I use Valhalla Vintage with Airwave bridge and it works nicely with Bitwig, modulators can control vst etc…