Hey there Linux community. I’ve been interested in Linux lately and have been considering switching to Linux Mint from windows 11. My main pc is a Surface Laptop Studio with an intel i7, 32g ram, 1 terabyte ssd, and an rtx 3050 ti gpu. I’m thinking about trying out dual booting to see how I like it, but I have some questions.
I use my laptop for a lot of creative work, video editing, web design, music production, photography, etc. I’m not too worried about it because I’ve come across many promising FOSS alternatives, but there’s some software I’d like to ask about specifically. I ditched Adobe Premiere in favor of Davinci Resolve a while ago and I know that there’s a native Linux version of Resolve, and I’m just curious about how well that runs for the people that use it?
As far as music production goes I’m an avid user of Ableton Live. It’s been my go to for years and I know that support for it on Linux isn’t the best, if it’s even there at all. I’ve seen a few people claim they’ve gotten it working but it seems a little suspicious to me. So to anyone in the music space, what are the best Linux supported alternatives? Or, in the event I decide to switch, should I maintain my dual boot setup to just stick with Ableton?
I’m also pretty locked into the Microsoft ecosystem with OneDrive (I get a terabyte of cloud storage for free so it’s where almost all of my files are). I’m in the process of trying to setup my own cloud storage with nextcloud or something similar, but until then I’m curious if I’d be able to set up OneDrive live file syncing in my Linux environment, similar to how it works on windows? If anyone has any experience with that I’d love to hear some input.
Not something that’s absolutely necessary, but I’m just curious if the touch support of my laptop would be maintained. Since it’s a surface device it’s actually a really nice touch screen, and the pen input is great, my wife borrows it for digital drawing sometimes and loves it. I don’t use it all the time but I do occasionally and it’d be a huge plus if it still worked just as well.
I think those are pretty much the only things holding me back from fully dedicating myself to switching, so I’d really appreciate some input. Thanks!
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Like others have said, reaper runs very smooth on linux. I’ve been using it for years now and it has been a rock solid experience. The rare times it freezes, is almost always due to windows vsts I’m running through a bridge.
I tried ableton through wine but that was not the best. Also, it was ages ago so it might be better or worse now. Bitwig looks pretty good and I’ve read good things about it as well.
If you’re into max for live, definitely try out puredata. It’s my main music tool now, together with sooperlooper and reaper.
As for distribution, I would go with debian. It’s a bit older but has never let me down. Coming from Windows I think the KDE desktop environment would feel the most user friendly.
Personally I would not do a dual boot. Either wipe the windows partition or swap ssd. It will be more pain free in the future. Windows has a tendency to mess up your linux install which is just plain annoying. Fixing it is always a major hassle.
Largest, freshest repo that deals with dependency issues for you!
For ablation, you can run it in wine and it can work well enough to do things. It’s an OK experience at best and flat out doesn’t work at worst. Kiss your VST plugins goodbye with that though, gotta stick to the built ins which do all work when it’s working overall.
Otherwise, check out bitwig studio, made by ex ableton devs and natively runs in Linux. Still gonna be hit or miss on 3rd party plugins but the app is on par with ableton as an experience. Price in the same range too. Best short explainer is ableton meets logic in terms of usability.
As for music production on Linux, I use Reaper. Check it out and see if it meets your needs.
Bitwig has a native Linux app, and is made by ex-Ableton developers.
Don’t use Onedrive, Dropbox or Google Drive (all privacy nightmares). Instead:
- Self-host https://nextcloud.com/ (this is the gold standard of self-hosting a secure and private cloud storage, you just need your own server with the disk space you need. Open source)
- P2P and/or self-host https://syncthing.net/ (this will automatically sync files in shared folders between several devices. Best if you have one device which is online all the time. Will use the space on your own devices. Open source)
- Storage on a trustworthy 3rd party host: https://proton.me/drive (this is the most similar to Onedrive/etc. where you sync your stuff to their servers, so you don’t need to host anything, but contrary to anything from Google/MS/Dropbox, this is at least a reputable and secure/private host which doesn’t abuse or sell your data. Data is encrypted by default. Also open source)
Furthermore, accessing Onedrive from Linux might be painfully inconvenient because there’s no official proprietary client for it by MS. There are 3rd party clients but I’m not sure how good they are, also MS could at any point change their API or even block unofficial clients, rendering your unofficial client useless at least for a time period.
I don’t have specific experience with the tools you list, however on googling it looks like Ableton Live does work under wine. Wine is what underpins playing windows games on Linux too; it’s very powerful and effective.
You can install Mint into a VM environment on your current PC (such as Virtual Box) and see how you get on with software you really can’t live without. It won’t run as fast as real life in a VM but you should get an idea whether any tools you can’t live without can work.
As for OneDrive there are unofficial clients to get it working with Linux if you want to sync to your local filesystem. However Microsoft doesn’t officially support it beyond Web browsers, so if you want something slick and supported you probably would be better migrating to other solutions. You’d certainly be able to migrate with the unofficial clients but I’m not sure I’d want to rely on them long term as things xna break if Microsoft unilaterally changes something.
Somewhat depends on the version of Linux you have. The ffmpeg build that is included with Ubuntu 24.04 for example is really an incomplete build and as a result there aren’t a lot of encoding / decoding options with any software that utilizes it for encoding and decoding, this includes Davinci Resolve and also kdenlive and for vlc playback. There is a fix for this but it is arduous, download ffmpeg from github and compile from scratch. Enable all the libs and codecs except for the MacOS specific ones. Now the fun part, run the configure script, it will break af the first missing lib, install that. Some libs you will also need to download source and compile from github at least with ubuntu because it’s not included in the distro. You will need to do this around 300 times because the moron that wrote the ffmpeg configure script, instead of listing ALL the libs missing so you could snatch them and install in one go, bombs out at the first, so you have to go through 300 or so iterations. I’ve done it, it’s painful, but at the end you end up with a much more capable ffmpeg and by extension Davinci Resolve than the pile of crap they provided you with.
Can’t you just install ffmpeg from a PPA rather than compile it yourself?
@entropicdrift It is not a complete build, many codecs are not compiled in.
There are PPAs with different builds of ffmpeg for Ubuntu. It also depends what codecs are needed as to whether this is even relevant?
Bearing in mind some (many) encoding codec libraries are not installed by default as most people don’t need them but can readily be added from the official repos via apt or synaotic. Each codec is usually provided as a library of its own; ffmpeg is more than just one set of binaries. There is a big difference between an incomplete build and incomplete default install of all available libraries/codecs. Most people don’t need or want every possible encoding codec installed by default.
However some codecs are more strictly licensed and may need to be installed or acquired via different routes - that is the nature or proprietary software (as on Windows).
Which codes are you saying are not available in Ubuntu official repos?
Sorry, there are no PPAs that have all codecs compiled in? Is it illegal to distribute or something?
@entropicdrift Not that I am aware of, I searched for some before I went to the effort of chasing down all the libraries and compiling myself and wasn’t successful at finding one.
Check out Ardour for music production. You should be able to get older versions for free on most distributions or get the current version for a donation via their website.
