For like a month or two I decided, screw it, I am going to use all the programs I cannot use on Linux. This was mostly games and music making software.
I guess it was fun for a bit, tries different DAWs, did not play a single game because no time.
Basically, it was not worth it. The only thing I enjoyed was OneDrive, because having your files available anywhere is dope, but I also hate it because it wants to delete your local files. I think that was on me.
Anyways, I am back. Looking at Nextcloud. Looking at Ardour. I am fine paying for software, but morally I got to support and learn the tools that are available to me and respect FOSS. (Also less expensive… spent a lot on my experiment).
Anyone done this? Abondoned their principles thinking the grass would be greener, but only to look at their feet coverered in crap (ads, intrusive news, just bad UI).
I don’t know. I don’t necesarily regret it, but I won’t be doing it again. What I spent is a sunk cost, but some has linux support, and VSTs for download. So, I shall see.
Running FOSS is practical for the long term, even beyond moral judgments. Proprietary software starts strong with lots of funding, but it only gets worse and worse as it goes along. Open source starts slower but plays the long game. You can take a look at something like Windows itself for an example of the gradual infestation of ads and user-hostile features/tracking. It’s never going to get better. The only hope for proprietary users is for a new proprietary app to be created and start off more user-friendly because they need to attract users. Once they have the users they’ll restart the cycle again.
That is what I am starting to realize. Every paid program that I used to desire is now subscription based.
Also, I am coming to terms with how truly powerful FOSS programs are. People seem to pay for the workflow, the user interface, more than the capabilities. At least I feel that way with DAWs. Ardour does everything. Vital makes every sound. I can be happy with that. I need to focus on making music.
The term you and @Yote are looking for is enshittification. Cory Doctrorow wrote a blog post about this.
Rent-seeking. That is a term I finally see defined.
I do not mind buying software, it is continuously paying for it that feels wrong.
Okay, lots of other comments I didn’t read, and this might have been mentioned.
👏Syncthing👏
You mentioned OneDrive. I also jumped around storage solutions as I explored the FOSS world, and nothing hold a candle to Syncthing (in my opinion, but I want/need to try nextCloud). I won’t drone on about it, but if you’re looking to ditch another big data company that’s probably scraping your files, check out Syncthing
Yes, Syncthing seems like the right solution. I don’t need to have files in someone elses computer, I just need certain files in all of my computers.
Its so damn seamless and easy.
I do gaming and music production on Linux without much issue at all these days.
Most games are pretty easy to work with these days thanks to Steam, Lutris, and Bottles.
As for audio, there are 4 key ingredients to my setup: Pipewire, Bitwig Studio, Wine and Yabridge.
Pipewire is pretty easy to use and works in a low latency setting just fine, so imo you no longer have to juggle PulseAudio + JACK.
Bitwig isn’t open source, but it’s fantastic and inspiring and supports Linux natively. They’ve also been great about stuff like the new open source CLAP plugin format.
I’ve found that Wine (staging) does a pretty reasonable job handling any Windows VST I’ve thrown at it, but it’s a bit of work getting it setup, especially if you’re new to the concept.
And finally yabridge is a great CLI tool for turning all of your Windows plugin .dlls into Linux .so, that you can easily use in your DAW of choice.
So if you want to do music production on Linux then definitely check out Bitwig and Reaper (along with Ardour, like you mentioned). And personally, I think that if you have a decent chunk of Windows VSTs it’s worth investing a bit of time learning how to getting them working in Wine and then bridged with yabridge.
Studio1 is now running on Linux (using Distrobox at least). Ambisonics and Binaural stuff are what I am mostly interested in, the IME Ambisonic toolkit poorly is not available as a Flatpak, otherwise Ardour would be awesome!
I’ve heard good things about Studio1, but I haven’t tried it myself.
Oh yeah, and speaking of Distrobox…
I also happen to have all of my audio production software (DAWs, Plugins, Wine, Yabridge, etc.) living in an Ubuntu-based distrobox container, which has the added benefit of allowing me to
exportsave the entire container and drop it mostly painlessly* onto a different machine. It’s really cool to be able to pick up my entire music making environment and bring it with me, but it might be a bit overboard for some people. I don’t have much of a choice other than to use distrobox since I run Fedora Silverblue as my daily driver. lol*It doesn’t work flawlessly, because I sometimes have to fix some important Wine symlinks that break when doing this.
Nice, how do you export Distroboxes? I am on Kinoite, funny seems to be quite common in the Lemmy Community.
https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_tips.md#container-save-and-restore
I think I followed this. I think you have to do it through podman/docker (whichever your distrobox is using).
It almost just worked, but again I had to fix a couple of Wine symlinks to get all of my Windows VSTs working again… (I also had to reregister some VSTs in certain cases.)
Another unrelated but useful thing to look into wrt distrobox is distrobox-assemble, especially if you have a few different distrobox containers dedicated to different tasks. I could go on and on about this stuff, lmao.
Nice! Wait you have Wine in a Distrobox making Windows VSTs work as a module for a Linux DAW? Thats crazy.
Meanwhile I would already be happy flatpakking the IEM ambisonit toolkit, to be a runtime and run with Ardour. I would love to do Ambisonic music, its such an old invention and never used, which is so weird?
Uh, yeah… So, basically I use an ubuntu:latest (LTS) distrobox container which has:
- Its own $HOME, specified using the
--homeparameter when making a distrobox container. - Wine-staging
- Yabridge
- Bitwig Studio 5 (the Linux .deb version, installed with dpkg to the default location)
- A whole bunch of Linux native plugins (like Modartt Pianoteq, installed wherever but then with the .so’s symlinked into my ~/.vst dirs).
- A whole bunch of Windows plugins (like an old version of Kontakt, SampleTank, AudioModelling SWAM, MODO Drum/Bass, etc.), installing in the WINEPREFIXES that live in the distrobox container’s $HOME. (I then use yabridge inside the container to bridge them all for Linux.)
- I think I also have Pipewire installed inside the audio production container, but I can’t remember if that’s necessary or not.
Finally, I use the distrobox-export command to export Bitwig Studio to my host system, so I can run it as you normally would, just hitting the start key and clicking on the Bitwig icon.
So it’s kind of a complicated setup initially, but from day to day it’s really easy to use. I just open Bitwig, load up whatever Linux or Windows VST (the Wine ones take a little longer to initialize that I’d like but it’s not too bad), and just make music. :)
- Its own $HOME, specified using the
This is solid. I am so happy for this advice, never heard of Yabridge. I am willing to mess around if it actually means I can use my plugins with Linux!
Yeah! Don’t sleep on it! I can say without reservation that yabridge is essential for me. :)
The basic yabrigde workflow is:
- Install wine-staging and yabridge on your distro of choice.
- Use wine to install all of your Windows VSTs somewhere. (I prefer to use a separate WINEPREFIX for each plugin maker, but that’s probably not fully necessary). If you don’t know much about Wine this can be a bit hard to wrap your mind around, but that’s another story.
- Then you run
yabridgectl addwhere all of your various Windows VST dll files are (instead of whatever Wine prefix you installed them in). - And then when you run
yabridgectl syncyabridge will create a .so bridge library for each of your Windows VSTs and spit them out into~/.vst3or whatever. - Finally you point your DAW of choice to
~/.vst3or whatever, and your WIndows VSTs should hopefully show up and work just like they do on Windows (with the usual caveat of Wine being pretty great but not always perfect).
Sadly there’s no good GUI frontend for it (that I know of at least), but as far as CLI tools it’s pretty easy to learn and use. Also, you may want to make sure that you’ve got realtime privilages setup on your system, and you can find guides to doing that in the yabridge wiki.
But yeah, I’ve got a bunch of Windows VSTs from Native Instruments and IK Multimedia and a bunch of others too, and they are work very well when bridged these days, so I’m able to use Linux for music without sacrificing anything.
Wow, thank you for the guide. I will try it out as soon as I can.
Or use this video to turn your vanilla distribution into an audio production powerhouse with a single script. Bitwig, Reaper, Windows VSTs, low latency, incredible!
I am finally getting around to doing this! I will admit, I had Windows on all of my machines… I first rehabilitated my laptop, and I finally brought back my main desktop from hell.
Running the script. Let’s see what my computer becomes!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Be sure to check out the README if you’re having problems with certain plugins (Kontakt for instance).
Yes, I know loading VSTs are possible, I just need to figure out how.
Check out Zrythm (currently in beta) as a FOSS Bitwig alternative.
Nice!! Linux has so many options for DAWs I never realized.
Welcome back. Good decision.
What you have learned about Linux is that the most important thing is FOSS/Libre computing.
Namely, that the user is no.1 and everything that the software does must always respect the freedom of the user and be to their benefit, and NEVER harm them.
THIS is what makes GNU/Linux special. Not the fact that it’s generally free of charge.
Now you’ve learned this, you will know why it’s impossible for any true Libre Linux user to ever go back to proprietary software. It doesn’t respect him or his freedom.
Now that you’re back, you have a ton of distros to choose from. Personally I use LMDE 6 but regular Mint is also great.
As for software, you may have to give up on some proprietary stuff if there is no FOSS equivalent but it’s worth it because you get your freedom in exchange.
If you depend on that software to make a living, simply install Oracle Virtualbox and run Windows in a VM just to run that software.
At least it can’t affect your Linux system and your main OS will be FOSS and when you’re done using your proprietary program, shutdown Winblows and it goes away until next time you need it.
Everything you typed out was a painful rediscovery on my part. I basically had to ignore my principles at every moment, but using Windows eventually became too gross, I had to get out.
For the money I spent experimenting with proprietary software, I could have donated to projects making the alternatives.
This is not a lesson I will need to learn again.
Don’t be too hard on yourself. The Linux path can be frustrating because you just wish the stuff was there that you need. And the pull of proprietary is the seeming ease with which you can get that stuff over there.
But it’s a bitter sweet trap. We all go though this until we realise we aren’t willing to take that crap anymore and we’ll just make due without that program/app and find another way to get stuff done.
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I don’t know your situation. I’m not an graphsit.
But what I’ve discovered,
There is nothing better to apply an self strict boycott, to learn other tools like gimp or others.In the gaming, the boycott work as a filter though, which game I can or I can’t.
And that’s fine, and more the time is going on, and more its better and I don’t feel my boycott hurting me so much. I’ve discovered (by my self, I knew it) apex legends last year to tell you XDto learn other tools like gimp or others.
If you’re doing anything professionally (even freelancing) that’s not often an option. No matter how good you are with gimp if client demands that you deliver PSDs to them. Even if you could model the next Titanic at the most beautiful way on freecad it’s worth nothing if client demands solidworks files. And so on.
Self imposed boycott is of course fine if it works for you. I’ve been using Linux since RedHat 5.2 as a daily driver, but since I make a living with computers as well I need to have Windows around for this and that. More often than not it’s of course paid by the company, but I’ve been doing freelance stuff as well and there I need to pay for my tools.
I swear whenever I mention I need my Adobe programs everyone is so quick to offer alternatives but NOTHING will be an alternative to a .psd/.ai file made in Photoshop or Illustrator. I need to make vectors in Illustrator, texture then in Photoshop, send the layers to After Effects, make some more vectors in Illustrator, use the same psd in InDesign… I can go without the cloud or streamlined UI but I really need that interoperability layer to function. Any time spent fiddling is costing me money as a bottom line.
And as someone who’s been spending hours learning FreeCAD, you’re really hitting me where I’m sensitive 😅
Let’s be clear, it’s not that you need to use Adobe products, it’s not that nothing will be an alternative to them, it’s that current FOSS alternatives just aren’t feature compatible, no matter how much the lay person likes to pretend they are. That’s fair, and that’s why I dual boot windows; some proprietary products are just better, and in a competitive industry, you can’t afford to use subpar tools.
But there’s no reason the FOSS version can’t be as good or better, it’s just a matter of funding and vision, which are both hard to come by in a non-profit world. I hope that one day we will see a cohesive suite of tools that can replace Adobe products, but I fully acknowledge that gimp 2, krita, inkscape, and blender ain’t it.
Eh, partially agreed but Adobe does have a stranglehold on the market due to proprietary encoding. The world still runs on their licensed filetypes and that’s a big hurdle for FOSS to overcome. A paradigm shift could happen but a lot is stacked up against it for now. Certainly not an issue that’s unable to be solved but we need some seriously clever minds dedicated to the problem.
Yeah clearly, that’s why I did start by saying I don’t know the situation of OP.
I’m speaking as an user/gamer, who do things just for myself mainly ^^
I don’t have the same consideration and focus as an freelancer like you. Clearly.
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A lot of documentation suppose, you like to know what you doing and why.
But if u do an tldr, and focus on the command lines, its often working out of the box and its like following an tutorial with picture to tell you where to click. Supposing you reading the good tuto regarding your distribution.
I like the doc, I feel it like respect.
I feel it like, they don’t suppose I’m an engineer but they suppose I have an brain an can learn new principles or acquire new vocabulary (one of the life’s constant in a way) to understand what I do. And often theses principles can be applied elsewhere, even IRL sometimes.
I’m not an engineer XD.
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I think they’re trying to say that a lot of the time reading the documentation treats you as if you’re an expert in that particular topic, but if you can find a good guide it will usually give you all the information and commands you need to accomplish what you wanted to do. They go on to say they prefer guides that respect the user’s intelligence while not making things overly complex.
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It doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t intelligent but perhaps you’re trying to do things you would do in Windows without having a foundational knowledge of Linux. Linux is not a drop-in replacement for Windows, it’s a totally different operating system with different ways of doing things.
In this example situation you are talking about it’s the equivalent of if I asked you to edit an image in Photoshop but you didn’t have it installed. That’s what “command not found” is trying to tell you. It’s not found because it’s not installed on the system.
Sorry too,
“… And if all else fails, you can always see the source code and fix it”
I get that. I mean, WINE has gone a long way, but it is not perfect. I think I need to buy an SSD just for Windows, and that would be ideal.
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I’ve no idea how to use Wine.
I truly do not generate that much stuff either. I am also not that precious with stuff I do make. I ak pretty sure I have a smaller SSD I can copy the image to, so no spending extra.
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Same, I switched to windows for a while for work and it was hell. None of the kde window management (using mod key for moving and resizing windows) and the Adobe and autodesk softwares wanted to take over my computer with their genuine, license, desktop “service” apps. I felt like i broke my kneecaps on purpose to walk on crutches. And pressing mod key opens the fucking ad start menu every single time, I hate it. Went back to Linux using photopea and inkscape.
Never heard of Photopea! I will check it out. GIMP sucks at text boxes for some reason, and honestly is kind of unacceptable the way it handles it.
Gimp sucks for me in general since I like to edit non-destructively. Photopea is a Photoshop clone but better. It don’t need to be installed and since it’s on the web you can get fonts directly on it.
Nice. My laptop is a 2014 MacBook Air, so running GIMP turns all the silicon into starch. Glad there is a web alternative!
Technically, I’ve done as you’ve described several times over. Did it with IOS and Android - I approached both with an open wallet and open to doing things differently than I was used to. Could say the same for several gaming consoles and Chrome. ALL have required concessions on my part that left a bad taste in my mouth - speaking strictly from a User Experience perspective.
The worst of it has been all the apps that dissappeared from the IOS Appstore - apps I paid for and now all that’s available are pale imitations full of ads and demanding subscriptions.
I’m not asking the same apps to work across multiple decades either - the gap between my first iPad and my second was less than eight years.
Delisting should be a crime.
Nope, I am starting to see software like books. Maybe the author has more to say, but barring any grammatical or logical errors, they are basically evergreen.
That’s probably the number one reason I will never use iOS on my phone, I couldn’t imagine not having backups of the best version of the apps I paid for, and not being able to stick to that version, and keep using it on newer phones.
I use an iPad and I got screwed of course as you mentioned, so now I only use it for streaming apps and that’s it.
I think Windows does some things well, that are just worse in KDE
- Ctrl+Alt+Delete, Taskmanager is actually privileged and can force close running apps. On KDE the same apps exist but they are not privileged enough. EDIT: of course it is privileged, but it doesnt even open if the “Desktop” hangs. There seems to be no privilege isolation, nothing left as security space for these tasks.
- The UI is more stable, the bars dont weirdly load, App Windows just open in full size and not fly around. When an app crashes I can still use the cursor (often)
The Rest is crap, like everything. Updates are horrible and intrusive without a single reason. Immutable updates are so much better, regular Linux Distros probably cant compare regarding security.
Taskmanager is actually privileged and can force close running apps. On KDE the same apps exist but they are not privileged enough
You can right-click on a process and select Send Signal → Kill. It will then ask for elevated privileges, if you’re trying to kill a process not directly started by you.
If you mean that some program really hangs your whole session, well, the last-ditch option is to switch to a TTY and kill it from there. But yeah, that one isn’t equipped with a nice GUI…
I have tried to use and like KDE so many times… I always go back to XFCE or GNOME.
Press ctrl+alt+esc. The cursor will change into a red skull and when you click a window, the process running it will be instakilled. Press esc again to cancel. That’s much better than going through task manager, finding the right process and then killing it.
This is X11 only.
Eh, I can’t use windows for any longer amount of time. I am WAY too paranoid. I always get the feeling of being spied on when I use windows. Like this slight nagging feeling in the back of my head. Never at ease as I am with linux.
I had the same feeling too, like I had to strip off all my clothes just to enter a the party.
I will not be doing that again.
Fixed this issue with Windows 11 Ameliorated. Now I can play VR in peace and also scroll through firefox without feeling this terror. Usually I felt very soon disgusted and booted up my usual Linux OS as soon as I stopped playing, but the ameliorated version fixed this feeling.
I’m running windows and others craps at work.
Like this, its working as a daily vaccine for me 🤣
Daily Linux user since 2013, specifically since the Snowden’s leaks.
I think I started using Linux way before that. I think I was just curious about whether I was missing anything. I really am not!
I did too, but with dualboot to keep windows next. Since 2013 its as monoboot, or if I have an dual its 2 linux/BSD but not an msdos system. 😊
Dualbooting with separate harddrives will probably be my solution.
Its the good choice if you feel it like this ! :D
Nextcloud or a samba server are good options. But if storage is not a issue I’d recommend checking out syncthing. I run it on my server and sync some directories to my phone and other directories to my desktop. And one directory between phone and desktop(obsidian notes). I don’t think you can run sycthing on iphones though.
I will try syncthing. I don’t actually want cloud storage, I just want to be able to mirror files to my different computers for easy access without messing about using flashdrives or bluetooth.
When I was still new to Linux I also had these phases from time to time where I went back to Windows, used mainstream software, like Microsoft Office, etc… I was still undecided if Linux was really worth all the hassle and I wasn’t quite settled on either side.
But I always returned to Linux for whatever reason. Probably because using Windows just didn’t feel right … The times where I returned to Windows got rarer and shorter the older I got. The last time I used Windows for an extensive amount of time was during the Windows 10 beta period. I even had a Windows Phone for a year! I returned to Linux roughly once Windows 10 was released as stable (funnily enough).
I believe that you are likely in a very similar situation at the moment as I was. I think you might just need some time to settle with something and get comfortable. ;)
I just wanted to see if I was missing something, but the programs I trialing are either way too expensive or do not do anything better than what is available to linux.
Nowadays switching to Windows isn’t really an option for me anymore, as I am just too invested into the Linux ecosystem.
It’s always funny hearing about how difficult it is to switch from Windows to Linux, because you have to relearn how to use a computer and all your favourite software isn’t available.
But for me it’s the same, but the other way around! I would have to relearn how to document my installation (scripts, etc.), what program to use for which task or how to force a game onto a certain monitor (the last time I looked into this, the only way on Windows was switching the primary monitor before starting said game; on Linux I can just tell KWin how to make the program behave).
It would be a lot of work with little or no benefit to me and I’m not even sure if all my hardware is compatible with Windows, as I did all my software and hardware purchases in the last decade with only Linux in mind and I usually didn’t purchase something if the manufacturer offered no support for Linux (money talks).
For the forcing games in monitors, loading the game in window mode, dragging it to the monitor of choice and making it fullscrern back usually works. And games remember the screen usually, some even have a selection panel (PoE).
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Have you considered Bitwig Studio? It has native linux support.
Reaper as well.
Yes. The cost is reasonable, and think it is worth it!
Right now I am using Tracktion Waveform, but I do not love it.
I am looking at Reaper, and I do like the workflow, but the way it loads plugins puts me off. Not horrible, I just need to do extra work to make it work.
I am a Bitwig fanboy, big time. The DAW is beyond everything else!
This video was a game changer for me. Turned my vanilla Linux Mint into an audio production powerhouse with a single script. Bitwig, Reaper, Windows VSTs, low latency. Incedible!Okay, I will drop the hundred for a Bitwig license because I know it is worth it.
This is what I needed! I have gone through every distro, including my favorite MX Linux, but settled on Linux Mint because it works better than everything else.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
You and I are in similar situations. I discovered Linux around 15 years ago and I wanted to fully switch over to it but found I couldn’t run games or photo/video/sound editing software the way I knew how (grew up with sailors discounts on the Adobe Suite).
Nowadays most of my previous hangups are solved. Almost all of my steam games work in Linux without any issue (1 or 2 games needed a single google search to paste the change needed to fix something), GIMP and Inkscape have way more extensions that increase QOL (not to mention Photopea being a literally photoshop clone with the exact same keyboard commands so your workflow doesn’t need to be relearned).
The only computers running windows in my house are my server (cause I just repurposed it and it’s working for now) and my VR computer (and that’s just because I’m lazy too since the Valve Index is fully Linux supported).
I use Windows at work and have no other choice. I don’t want any of my other computers to feel like my work computer. Feels like I haven’t left work.
Using Windows made me appreciate Linux harder than I ever have. Windows just feels gross now.
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Yeah, there is a pervasive “wrongness” to it that I just could not stand, like I took off my front door or something.
