LinuxMusicians

Are any of you "distro hoppers"? (People who test drive various Linux distributions a lot)

I used to be a big distro hopper. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot. Each distro is truly unique and has it's own advantages and disadvantages.

I'm possibly about to buy a new computer pretty soon, but I'm not really sure if I still have the mental focus to be able to easily test out various distros without desperation and frustration and forgetfulness and clumsiness.

I used to be able to get most systems to work OK on various used computers. But several years later now, I'm not really up to date on any of this stuff.

Are there any cutting edge new or classic good old distros I should be checking out?

I also want to steer as far away as possible from malicious hackers and malware.
My end goal, of course, is to be making music.
Which Linuxes should I start out with?

tapenade wrote: ↑Tue Apr 19, 2022 7:47 pm Are any of you "distro hoppers"? (People who test drive various Linux distributions a lot)

During 28 years I have been using on my personal machines Slackware, Redhat, Debian and Ubuntu. Does it make me distro hopper?

tapenade wrote: My goal is to be making music.

Then go with AV Linux MX. There's a lot of customization you need to do to a stock kernel (and distro that uses such a kernel) to get the best audio/music performance. And AV Linux has all that done for you.

j_e_f_f_g wrote: ↑Tue Apr 19, 2022 8:02 pm

tapenade wrote: My goal is to be making music.

Then go with AV Linux MX. There's a lot of customization you need to do to a stock kernel (and distro that uses such a kernel) to get the best audio/music performance. And AV Linux has all that done for you.

Another vote for AVL-MXE. It's been excellent here for some time.

Alex.

Well I think in the beginning we all have been distro hoppers...

Like many in my country, I started out with Suse. Then later on I tried Red Hat, but found it both to be too far on the commercial side of things, and me finding myself in what was called RPM hell during that time. So I tried some of the BSD family and learned what great package management could be. Later I built lots of stuff myself using Gentoo, until a young colleague suggested to try Debian.

And I've stayed with that one until today. Perfect package management, a non-commercial approach, and a democratic one as well. I felt the need to give back, which is what I did, and I've made many friends within the Debian Developer community during that time.

Today Debian stable is my main distro, and I dual boot into Arch to test more current things like pipewire, together with the latest Gnome and whatnot. On top of Debian I'm using the KXStudio repositories, and I'm also a supporter of Ardour. I've also tried (and paid for) both Reaper and Harrison Mixbus but went back to Ardour because of its flexibility and great support, plus because it's open source.

Today in case I want to have a quick look at a new or somehow interesting distro I just use a VM for that, no need for anything real-time mostly. Oh, and both my wife and daughter use Ubuntu (the daughter also for music) on their notebooks and desktops - and I think these will be updated tomorrow. This is enough of distro hopping for my needs and limited time...

Hope that helps?
Cheers,
Wolfgang

I used to do a lot of distro hopping and I think that it's a good thing when starting out but now that I found a distro (openSUSE Tumbleweed) that (almost) perfectly matches what I am looking for (anyone can contribute to packages, proprietary stuff out is easy to avoid, rolling, sane defaults), I plan on staying here.

Thanks very much for the prompt replies.
I'm still not sure if I should hold off on buying a computer and just buy a dedicated Audio Workstation.

I was making lists of pros and cons of each (Audio DAW, or Computer) and I realised and remembered that as much as I enjoy computing, I've experienced so much LOSS in the past, that just the idea of reverting to prior behaviors of researching, downloading, configuring, working, etc makes me feel very nervous. My biggest loss was buying a fancy system, struggling to get Windows S Mode off of it, successfully installing a Linux that seemed to have been hacked at the ISO level (Man In the Middle Attack), and culminated with the still pretty well-functioning system being STOLEN along all my other belongings while I was traveling. I only got to use my nice new system for about 1 week and 1/2 before it was stolen.

That time kinda just broke up my sense of safety. But the temptation is still there, because so many of the best synthesis sounds and nicest crossfading edits seems to be only available as software. But it seems the loss of time due to unpredicatble problems seems to be mysterious and ever present in computing.

Anyways, I'm also tempted to try to give back to the Linux community and audio professional / hobbyist communities as well.
And I have other hobbies and interests and tasks that might be good to do with a system.

Using android systems felt insulting and abusive so I'm glad to get away from that and hopefully back into some kind of reasonable hobby and career activity.

Anyways, I still don't know... computers might be magnets for thieves. But if I bought an MPC ONE, I'd still have the same issue of it being hard to secure away from thieves while I'm mobile. I don't know yet.

tapenade wrote: ↑Wed Apr 20, 2022 6:57 pm My biggest loss was buying a fancy system, struggling to get Windows S Mode off of it, successfully installing a Linux that seemed to have been hacked at the ISO level (Man In the Middle Attack), and culminated with the still pretty well-functioning system being STOLEN along all my other belongings while I was traveling. I only got to use my nice new system for about 1 week and 1/2 before it was stolen.

Huh?? I can't foresee that being even vaguely possible with any of the Distros mentioned here... Plus you can boot all of them from USB key and try them as long as you want to make sure they aren't causing any harm.. In the case of AV Linux MX Edition you can make a persistent key with MX Linux USB Maker and if the key is large enough you could work for months without affecting a host system at all. Plug in and go all your settings and data are saved to the key..

Glen sent me a USB drive containing AV Linux. But I think he accidentally sent me a drive intended for someone else. Apparently, this USB thumb drive was supposed to be sent to a monk in some monastery. The guy's name is "Key". I surmised this from the note Glen included with the drive, which read:

Presented To A Monk Key.

j_e_f_f_g wrote: ↑Thu Apr 21, 2022 12:02 am Glen sent me a USB drive containing AV Linux. But I think he accidentally sent me a drive intended for someone else. Apparently, this USB thumb drive was supposed to be sent to a monk in some monastery. The guy's name is "Key". I surmised this from the note Glen included with the drive, which read:

Presented To A Monk Key.

Groan...

Dunno if you have kids but that's what we in the business call a 'Dad joke'...

GMaq wrote: Dunno if you have kids

Frankly, neither do I.

j_e_f_f_g wrote: ↑Tue Apr 19, 2022 8:02 pm

tapenade wrote: My goal is to be making music.

Then go with AV Linux MX. There's a lot of customization you need to do to a stock kernel (and distro that uses such a kernel) to get the best audio/music performance. And AV Linux has all that done for you.

This relatively short 'Pro Audio Tuning Guide' may get you going quickly on Manjaro...

https://github.com/ElizabethHarmon/ManjaroProAudio

GMaq wrote: ↑Wed Apr 20, 2022 11:26 pm

tapenade wrote: ↑Wed Apr 20, 2022 6:57 pm My biggest loss was buying a fancy system, struggling to get Windows S Mode off of it, successfully installing a Linux that seemed to have been hacked at the ISO level (Man In the Middle Attack), and culminated with the still pretty well-functioning system being STOLEN along all my other belongings while I was traveling. I only got to use my nice new system for about 1 week and 1/2 before it was stolen.

Huh?? I can't foresee that being even vaguely possible with any of the Distros mentioned here... Plus you can boot all of them from USB key and try them as long as you want to make sure they aren't causing any harm.. In the case of AV Linux MX Edition you can make a persistent key with MX Linux USB Maker and if the key is large enough you could work for months without affecting a host system at all. Plug in and go all your settings and data are saved to the key..

Naw, the OS wasn't stolen, the whole computer was. (My backpack was stolen). But I was able to confirm that the ISO that I used to install some stuff from got hacked somehow. I used to use the same distros over and over again, and I got used to one of the dev's styles. The hacked distro immediately looked bogus as soon as it booted up. And then later on, I was getting odd errors in Synaptic in ways that seemed rare.

But this year, I checked that distro again, and it seems fine. I think in the past, it was my copy of the ISO that got hacked, not necessarily the whole repo or download mirror. But it was during a time when there was tons of malicious hacking going on in the news too.

Anyways, things are OK these days with what I'm using. I wasn't blaming the distro makers. But given that there can be MITM attacks at average public hotspots, I'm just glad it's in the past. Smooth sailing lately. Sorry for confusing you.

The Windows S Mode crap isn't as hard anymore either.
It wasn't really an issue later on. With the commands to just erase the drive, and Windows too, it's not a problem anymore.
I think this time around I got better BIOS settings happening too.

j_e_f_f_g wrote: ↑Tue Apr 19, 2022 8:02 pm Then go with AV Linux MX. There's a lot of customization you need to do to a stock kernel (and distro that uses such a kernel) to get the best audio/music performance. And AV Linux has all that done for you.

I use Linux Mint, and I discovered the Liquorix kernel. Simply followed the brief instructions at https://liquorix.net/#install, and it cut out about 90% of the latency caused by the original Mint kernel. Works flawlessly and couldn't have been any easier.

Maybe it is good mention that latency for usb audio devices has much improved since Linux Kernel 5.14.
The need for Prof. Audio optimizations / rt kernels and special audio distro's just for low latency is greatly reduced.
But of course YMMV (no need to restart the latency discussion here)