DAC Protogen

Everyone is on the “hate Red Hat” train right now, and this might just be bad communication or not fully in context, or both.

I just yesterday distro-hopped to Linux Mint, the new release is quite pretty :3

I must say, I have mixed feelings about it. When Gnome 3 replaced Gnome 2, I just hated it. It was missing features in every aspect, and the ergonomics were… questionable at best. Over time, modern Gnome evolved and since version 42, I think it’s a modern, pretty desktop environment. It is clean and readable on the eyes, looks fancy with all those animations, and there are amazing apps with almost minimalist approach, really useful, nicely integrated into a unified design language. I ran Fedora Silverblue for almost a year now, and it took me about 6 weeks to get used to the modern Gnome workflow. It’s just that different. And for a while, I even began to think that I really like it and that it might be my favourite desktop environment now. But lately… I just start to think that with a simple, traditional DE like XFCE, it would be way easier to manage many open applications and windows, and those fancy animations start to really annoy me. I think I have explored Gnome enough to now think that I prefer the oldschool way. I’ll be on something with XFCE soon.

I can’t remember how old I was, but it was during my youth when I bought a computer magazine that came with a “rescue CD” with Knoppix on it. I thought it was really cool, but never did more than looking around in the OS and playing around with it. It had KDE 3.5, which I really liked though. It felt comfy, and that would manifest in the back of my mind. Months or years later, I bought a magazine with a SUSE Linux… I believe 9.2 and supposedly modified for Linux gaming. That got me curious. Same thing, I took a closer look at it, found it really cool and comfy, played around with it, but ultimately it could never replace Windows for me at the time. But the seed was planted, and curiosity remained. Years later, I learned more about Linux during some training for an IT job, and I got the LPIC-1 certification. My journey with magazine DVDs continued, this time with Ubuntu. I got more and more comfortable with the applications and desktop environments, but still, it would not replace Windows for me. I tested Ubuntu and Linux Mint on a cheap notebook for a while, and later, as Linux got better and better on the desktop, I gave Linux Mint a shot on my PC in dual boot. Years of distro hopping, testing, coming back to Windows for gaming and music production software, Windows frustration and the urge to switch to Linux… Then, in 2018, I had enough. I really wanted to get rid of Windows. I bought a 27" iMac as a studio machine for my music production. Of course I evaluated it for a while as a Windows replacement, but where it shines for creative applications, it is useless for a gamer. The durations I spent with Linux on my main PC increased. Still often would come back to Windows. I was changing my OS like pants basically, just because of fucking gaming. FINALLY, as Valve pushed Proton and Steam on Linux, I was able to make the final jump to Linux in 2022. It was now supporting so many great games that I could live with the few that won’t run. Since 2022, I am exclusively on Linux on my PC and notebook(s) and I won’t look back. It keeps getting better, where Windows falls apart in quality, privacy invasion and user experience. I’m still distro hopping, but I actually enjoy that. It has become almost a hobby. And I’m about to discover the BSD world, I think. Cute little detail: That SUSE Linux from the magazine DVD in my youth had some nice wallpapers that I liked and that I associate with that “comfy” feeling I had while exploring it. I still keep those wallpapers in my wallpaper folder like a treasure, even if I don’t actually use them. Except for one, that I still use from time to time: https://wallhere.com/id/wallpaper/163038 That in combination with KDE 3.5 was really lovely, and I still enjoy this one from time to time on my desktop.

Yes, Ubuntu as a foundation offers a few advantages. It’s nothing you can’t live without, but useful details that make it a bit more flexible and suited for a wider audience. I found an already pretty great answer, so let me just link it to you: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?p=2297907#p2297907

I forgot to mention in the “Why Mint” section that they also are very clever and maintain Linux Mint Debian Edition. It’s the same thing, just based on Debian, which is the foundation that Ubuntu is built on. So in case anything happens with Ubuntu as their technological foundation, (and let’s be honest, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu has had some bad moments in the past) there still is a nearly identical Linux Mint, unaffected, based on Debian. So it’s an additional safety, that you don’t have to learn and migrate to something new again. Even if Ubuntu would fail and completely vanish over night, people still have Linux Mint as they know and love it.

This on and off again, multiple attempt path seems to be the norm. Learning something new sometimes requires developing a taste or skills, or slowly growing in confidence with each attempt, as your experiences grow. Sometimes, the comfort zone of the things you already know is too big, too tempting. Even if you want to get away from something like Windows. Really making the final jump to leave seems to be a multi-phased process of discovery and easing into something new. My journey to become fully free of Windows took many years and multiple attempts, too. Mostly because I am a gamer and musician, and both these areas simply weren’t well enough supported in Linux until recent years.

Yeah, if your workflow is centered around recording and arranging audio, then it can work decently. But if you’re having anything to do with MIDI / virtual instrument based composition, I wouldn’t recommend it. Their MIDI implementation has for the longest time been based on sample time instead of musical timing, so it was very janky. They have worked on that, but the implementation of “proper” MIDI is still very new and still needs work. Also, their inline note editor is just terribly uncomfortable to work with, and they refuse to have the MIDI editor in a separate window, like most other DAWs out there. And yes, the situation with bugs and stability is not really ideal. It’s not terrible and most definitely suitable for hobby or semi-professional work, but I wouldn’t rely on it professionally.

Out of curiosity, what do you mean with AV software, antivirus or audio / video? If the latter is the case, check out Blender, Kdenlive, OpenShot, Flowblade, GIMP, Krita and Inkscape for graphical and video work. Pix is great for managing your photos and RawTherapee might be sufficient for your raw photo editing needs. On the audio production side, if you need a simple but powerful audio editor, look for Tenacity (a fork of Audacity). For music production, you can wonderfully work with Renoise, Reaper and Bitwig Studio natively on Linux. To make Windows VST plugins work on Linux, check out the plugin host Carla. But there are also many great linux-native VSTs out there, for example the TAL-Sampler. Great quality, free plugins are offered too, for example from https://calf-studio-gear.org/. There are websites that list other sources.

Btw, it’s quite likely that your audio interface just works plug 'n play, if it is not too exotic. You can google that in advance though.

• Recommended distribution coming from Windows: Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition. linuxmint.com Why? Very consistent over many versions, no experiments, comfortable, very classic Windows-like desktop. Actually amazingly designed and very helpful “welcome” tool after installation, to help new users set up the system well. The Mint team develops and maintains useful and cool applications. Based on Ubuntu, so most problems you can web-search for both Mint or Ubuntu and find solutions. It’s based on the long-term-support version of Ubuntu, so it gets 5 years of security updates for each version. It has Flatpak enabled by default, which is a modern, widely accepted software container format, so programs can run independently of the distribution. Flatpaks are more up to date than traditional packages from a distribution’s software repositories. With things like gaming, you want the latest software to benefit from new features, enhancements and compatibiliy, so make use of Flatpak for your applications where possible.

• Easy tool to write a .ISO or .IMG file to a USB stick in order to boot Linux from it: Balena Etcher or Fedora Media Writer (it can write other images than Fedora too and lets you format / restore the USB stick with a single button, great tool).

• Definitely back up all your files on at least a large USB stick, but better an external HDD or SSD (USB sticks might at some point become corrupt or break, they are not as reliable). Having your pictures, documents, videos, etc. always on an external disk means you can easily reinstall any OS and just copy your stuff over. Update this backup from time to time. This will give you the safety net to confidently discover and experiment.

• If you have only one computer, prepare a Windows installation USB stick before your Linux adventures, just in case something breaks and you want to repair it or go back to Windows.

• Dual boot can be annoying, and sometimes one OS may ruin the bootloader of another. I recommend a separate machine, or at the very least a separate physical SSD per OS.

• Don’t try to make Windows applications work on Linux unless you absolutely have no other alternative and choice but to use them. Pretty much anything you may be used to is either available as a Flatpak, a traditional package in the distro’s repository or has great open source or Linux-compatible alternatives. Learn to web-search for those alternatives and install them from the software center app that comes with your distro. On Linux, you don’t have to go to websites and download setup files. Everything sits inside a giant software repository and gets updated along with your OS when you look for updates. A Linux Distribution has a repository for its own packages, and Flatpak containers come from a separate repository, most commonly flathub.org. On desktop-centric distributions, you get appstore-like graphical tools to search, install, remove and update everything from one place.

• If you absolutely have to make a Windows app work on Linux, have a look at “Bottles”. It’s a UI that makes it a bit easier and more comfortable to work with the Windows compatibility layer called WINE.

• Don’t try to search for driver setups on websites unless something really doesn’t work. Most common hardware is supported out of the box, as a ton of general purpose drivers are shipped with the distro as kernel modules already. If you have a Nvidia GPU, expect some issues and consider buying AMD graphics in the future. AMD drivers are inside the Linux kernel these days and open source, whereas Nvidia has a history of not cooperating with the open source crowd, so the open drivers are reverse-engineered, hacky, not-so-great solutions. Desktop-focused distributions like Ubuntu, Linux Mint or Pop! OS have built-in tools to easily enable / select proprietary Nvidia drivers. For gaming, they are pretty much required. On other distros that don’t offer this comfort, you’ll have to manually install the proprietary Nvidia drivers and that is a nightmare, likely to brick your system on your first few attempts. With AMD or Intel graphics, you don’t have to do anything, they just work.

• If you’re a German reader, you’re in luck. There is an amazing, free online book if you really want to dive deep into Linux: https://openbook.rheinwerk-verlag.de/linux/ Unfortunately, I don’t know an english equivalent, if you know one, please link it to me.

• In case you might be a PC gamer, you’ll likely have a Steam account. Valve does an amazing job, they take the Windows compatibility layer WINE, add some magic to it, the result is called Proton. To enable it, you just have to go to the Steam settings - Compatibility - Enable Steam Play for all other titles. You can now simply install and run Windows games, thousands of them just work and the list grows continously. See protondb.com to check which game works or might have issues and how to fix them. For other places like GOG, Epic, Ubisoft, etc. check out Lutris. It’s a very cool launcher that helps you set up all these accounts in one place. Advanced tip: a guy called Glorious Eggroll patches things into Proton that Valve can’t add for licensing reasons and offers improved, unofficial Proton versions called GE-Proton. If you have issues getting a game to run with the normal Proton versions, GE-Proton might make a difference. A neat little tool to install GE-Proton is “ProtonUp-Qt”: https://flathub.org/de/apps/net.davidotek.pupgui2

I love the branding and general concept of openSUSE, and YAST is amazing, but I absolutely hate the dependency hell they have going on with their “patterns”. Patterns are metapackages, so a pattern basically just refers to other packages and installs a whole bunch of them. It just gets really messy once a pattern may refer to another pattern to make sure that everything it needs is installed. I’m not sure if that still is the case these days, but I found it really confusing and difficult to get the distro install only the stuff I want and need and trim down on anything else. You can already do this in the mighty installer or try it after installation, but both ways, patterns really got in my way. You may see the same pattern be suggested in multiple categories if I remember right, and if you overlook it only once, updates will pull all that stuff again. I would love to use openSUSE, it has a lot going for it, but that package management is a nightmare and one of the worst I have encountered during distro hopping, thanks to those patterns.