Hi, I'm an amateur musician and longtime linux user from Germany :)

[tjarx]

Hello, fellow linuxmusicians,

I am very excited to join this community as it's very special that we share not one, but two great passions at once around here. How extraordinary in these times of increasing societal fragmentation.

I would like to introduce myself and also give you an idea about what I currently care and think about linuxmusic-wise.

I am a long time linux user but would not consider myself a power user yet. Though, thanks to my current setup including arch and pipewire, never before have I dug so deeply into my system. It is time consuming but also very educational. For example, I recently got very excited to learn that this thing called "udev" exists, that lets you write rules to execute scripts when something hardware happens. I used that to display the connection status of my midi-usb devices in my taskbar.

I like my current setup with arch, pipewire, i3 window manager, reaper as my daw and the Behringer UMC404HD. But there are periods when I spend more time configuring my system than actually playing or making music. So I am thinking about switching to a minimal Debian stable netinstall instead and hopefully find a config that will work for a long time.
So I'm interested to hear any experiences using debian or debian based with pipewire for low-latency audio recording. Especially considering that Debian serves older versions of packages (esp. pipewire). Would I not be missing out on some important features and fixes?

A second thing is that I am a tiling wm user but came to the conclusion that for music production what I actually want is not the tiling, but just a multi-workspace, keyboard-based workflow. So I have been thinking about trying out Enlightenment or IceWM. And input about such workflows is very appreciated

Talking about music, I play the ukulele, a little piano and recently started electric guitar and electronic drums. I jam with friends, record short ideas or quick backing tracks to accompany on guitar, bass (my partner has one) or drums. I currently aim for becoming better at guitar and drums. I also want to learn about songwriting as I have some three chords progressions stuck in my head that I somehow need to finalize but don'thave the slightest idea,how to do that.

So, I am happy to be here and looking forward to fruitful mutual exchange

See you around!
tjarx

[MattKingUSA]

Welcome tjarx!

[Basslint]

Welcome @tjarx! I too used to a tiling wm user, then, after many years, I switched initially to OpenBox and then, finally, to KDE Plasma. It's very lightweight and configurable for a DE and it has a great third-party plugin for tiling called Bismuth which offers the possibility of whitelisting programs which need to run in floating mode, as well as one-click toggling. I have never been as satisfied with UX on GNU/Linux and performance is great on an old PC.

[salve]

Hi

I'm new here too. And I'm looking forward to read what others might answer to your post.

I guess that I can't really say much of interest to you, because, while you seem to be somewhat minimalitic minded, I'm probably quite extreme in that direction! I used Windows for a year or two 20 years ago. Then switched to Linux. I tried KDE and Gnome, of course, but quickly started to explore the minimalism that Linux allowed, opposing "Desktop envirement" and allowing an antique "workflow". That is: I fell in love with the command line. I never really got the gospel of DEs.

So I ended up with only the most minimalistic window manager I could find: Evilwm. I still use it. It was not maintained for a long time, so I managed to configure Openbox to behave almost exactly like Evilwm and made up my mind to switch. Great! ... But then Evilwm was updated and I'm back.

I use Debian testing (Bookworm) with Pipewire. I also use the Behringer UMC204HD. That one did NOT work well with the kernel 1 month or 2 ago (6.1.0-1*), but the problem(s) seems to have been fixed with the current kernel:
..:~$ uname -a
Linux ... 6.1.0-3-amd64
This is a quote from that kernels changelog:
ALSA: usb-audio: Workarounds for Behringer UMC 204/404 HD

I have actually never used computers much with my music making, partly because previously, Linux has been confusing (for me) with audio, but Pipewire seems very promising. So this may change! Also, Linuxmusicians may help too!
(I play mostly for myself, though. People and microphones scares me )

[tjarx]

Thank you all!

@Basslint :
I have actually used KDE before on my music production machine but recently switched back to i3. Your post made me reconsider KDE but the biggest problem is it somehow contradicting my approach of carefully building a system up from scratch. KDE is great but it comes with many things that I don't need. I still have to make up my mind and your post didn't make my decision easier

@salve
Welcome
Thanks for the info. Luckily, Debian 12 stable will come with a recent enough kernel version.

I also fear microphones and people a little, like you. But it has gotten a looot better with time and practice.

[Gps]

Welcome, and I cant help you with Debian.

I am on openSUSE Tumbleweed (KDE), Its rolling like arch, but far from minimalistic.

Running geekos DAW. Which makes opensuse more music oriented.

[Basslint]

@Basslint :
I have actually used KDE before on my music production machine but recently switched back to i3. Your post made me reconsider KDE but the biggest problem is it somehow contradicting my approach of carefully building a system up from scratch. KDE is great but it comes with many things that I don't need. I still have to make up my mind and your post didn't make my decision easier

KDE Plasma nowadays is pretty modular, you can configure (or entirely disable) many features. They will still occupy disk space (but then, isn't disk space cheap nowadays? ) but not impact performance. I come from awesome, wm, xmonad, i3 and I think I am not noticing any worse performance, even if this same PC got much older since I last used them!

[wjl]

Hi and welcome tjarx

• and same here: longtime Linux user, musicianship amateur(ish) at best, used to run a triple boot setup on my old machine with Arch & Pipewire (for the fun), Debian stable (for the sane 'work' environment), and Windows 10 (for all that stuff which requires an OS like that).

Now, on a newer hardware I'm back to Debian stable with a kernel from backports (so I have kernel 6.x which runs nicely with the new AMD machine). But no experiments with Debian stable - as long as they won't use Pipewire (they will in Bookworm I think), I'm not using it as well. Oh, and Wayland doesn't play that nicely with OBS and such in Debian stable, the much newer Arch was a bit better in that regard (but Wayland was introduced much too early IMO).

Ok; enough ranting about systems and their chosen packages, greetings again, this is a good place to be.

Cheers,
Wolfgang

[tavasti]

A second thing is that I am a tiling wm user but came to the conclusion that for music production what I actually want is not the tiling, but just a multi-workspace, keyboard-based workflow. So I have been thinking about trying out Enlightenment or IceWM. And input about such workflows is very appreciated

With Awesome WM you could have both. Each 'desktop' can have their own tiled layout, but can be also floting mode.