Hi everyone,
I’m getting fed up windows and want to switch my laptop to linux. My laptop also doesn’t meet windows 11 standards so I figured nows a good time to switch. I don’t do a whole lot on my laptop, but there are some programs that I do need to use. I have an E drum kit and right now I use reaper and Steven slate audio center to play and record my drums through my laptop. I looked at reaper, and I see linux options for download. But for Steven slate , I only see windows and Mac. This is pretty disappointing and so I figured I ask to see what would work for me.
I was going to go with Ubuntu, because it seems to be the most user friendly and has good support. I also use mullvad VPN on my laptop very frequently, which was another reason I chose Ubuntu.
Any help is appreciated. I’m willing to look at other distros too if there is one that better fits my needs.
EDIT: I have successfully migrated to linux mint and have reaper working with yabridge. Thanks, everyone, for your help and suggestions!
Distro only matters if you know nothing about the OS, don’t want to figure it out and fully rely on defaults. Pro Audio is not always straightforward.
What you need for DAWs to work properly is an audio server with JACK API support and low latency. There are two options for that at the moment:
Actual JACK daemon that takes full control over chosen sound card/audio interface. It’s the old solution that is also well tested and some will argue that it’s more reliable.
PipeWire + pw-jack, the modern sound server that already runs by default on most modern Linux distros (including recent versions of Ubuntu), that is way more flexible, while also being impressively performant. It allows using any amount of sound hardware at the same time and route audio freely, mix regular audio clients with pro-audio/low latency ones and generally is far more flexible. This should be the goto for most people as it’s the easiest to setup (if you already use PW as your sound server) and only requires installing pw-jack.