cross-posted from: https://lemmy.studio/post/3409116
Ideas and Tips for Dual Boot and Audio Things on Linux (2011 Laptop)
Research post
--> Before you contribute anything to this post, please be aware that I research a Music Production related topic on Lemmy/Mastodon.Hi there,
not even sure if this community is still active, but I will give it a go ;) I’m looking for distro ideas and tips for setting up Audio.
So, here’s the situation: I’ve been thinking about switching DAW for a while now and just tried LMMS so far, which I didn’t like at all. I’m curious to check out Reaper and/or Ardour next while also considering Bitwig as another option.
Currently I use an old MacBook Pro (~2011) for Music Production - running MacOS and Ableton Live 10. The plan is to Dual Boot this machine for now, but I’m unsure which Distro to go for. SSD is new, I can dedicate around ~250 Gigs to this install, which is a lot since I mainly use external storage usually. 4 GB of RAM, I think some swap space would be ideal.
On my main machine I’ve so far tried Ubuntu Studio for about 3 Weeks, so this is absolutely not an option. Then I’ve tried Mint for literally just 3 Days because I really hated the look of it (maybe no surprise as a long-time Mac user). I’m on arch-based/Arch with Plasma 5/6 + pipewire now since around 2 years. Haven’t been touching on anything Music Production related on here, just the average everyday use to play Videos and Music (which just worked out of the box) so I’m not really familiar with anything Audio-related on Linux.
I want the Music Laptop to just be pretty minimal, a bit of Note-taking and Office stuff besides the DAW’s. The Laptop is usually offline, so I think going for Arch/ a rolling release is not very ideal. I thought about just Gnome or Plasma 6 on Debian, as I wanted to try out Debian for future projects anyways. Not sure how this will play out on that old Laptop, so just thought I’d ask if there’s any experience with older machines before I get into it. Also open for other recommendations in case I missed some other good distro option, I feel like I’m also in an experimental phase currently and wouldn’t mind distro-hopping for a bit.
Then, I feel a bit overwhelmed by the whole audio thing, so I would be very thankful for useful tips, videos, websites or similar that might help me to figure things out.
I own a Focusrite Audio-Interface, and it will be a problem if I can’t get this running, but I will definitely try it out before I buy a new one. Another issue with this Laptop is that the Audio jack broke years ago inside the machine, so it’s not even possible to get any sound out of this thing if not via the Interface lol. Well, actually there is: Bluetooth Speakers, which I also do own but… meh. Usually on Headphones for Music Prodcution, so I kinda need the Interface. Not a huge VST user, so this is less of an issue for me. I mainly use my Interface to record Instruments/Mics or just my field recorder and Samples.
Hope I can get some feedback on my throughts and recommendations, thanks a lot in advance!
On the DAW, the three are good, I use Ardour cause it’s a free software, but I’ve been told the other two are good, specially for people coming from ableton who want something close. Ardour is really a old-fashioned saw like pro-tools.
Check Librazik it’s a distro based on debian made for musicale production.
I’d say you don’t need a specific distro for what you want to do : a Debian or Arch with KDE could do the trick, but I would recommend to use a lighter desktop environment like Xfce. You may not like it coming from mac but it will preserve machine resources for your audio work.
Ardour runs pretty much on it’s own on any distro, you can still do some conf, I suggest to go to linuxmao.fr the website is mostly in French but have a lot of configuration documentation.
This audio interface will not be an issue as it’s plug and play on Linux since a while now.
i used to have a 2013 macbook air from the electronics disposal bin and used it for five years as my daily driver. i don’t know how well it would do considering all your audio related constraints; but in your shoes i would do some quick and dirty testing with a live linux distribution on usb drive.
i would go with elive because it comes preinstalled with proprietary software; including things for multimedia, like codecs. you could also do it w any other distro, but why not save yourself the extra steps; since we’re only looking for breadcrumbs to follow anyways.
i used to use a headset w a usb audio dongle circa 2002 on red hat linux and the breadcrumbs i found back then led me to discover that getting it to work required the proprietary software that the distros wouldn’t carry because of the licensing. so i spent days tearing apart my new installation trying to get it to work with the help of strangers on internet linux forums and ultimately failed; i later succeeded with mandrake linux and ran with that for about 3ish years before switching to debian and later elive.
elive has already figured out all the intricate details necessary to get that software to work and i’m inclined to believe that they made significant improvements over the last 20ish years. you can use the fruits of their labor for a quick and non-invasive test that can be the first breadcrumb that leads you to whatever you end up using for your two machines while ensuring your audio requirements will be met; maybe elive can also help with other proprietary software or maybe it’s people on the software that they use that are like yours.
also: you lost me on Focusrite Audio-Interface paragraph so i don’t understand how it fits into any of this.
