Old 06-17-2021, 01:18 PM   #1
The Kid
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As I said in another threadn I'm using Reaper native on Linux Mint, with a behringer u-phoria umc202hd. Works great, I don't use Jack, i used to, but I read in this forum that ALSA does the job, and it does great.
What distros and interfaces are you people using, and why?

EDIT: I use Linux Mint because it's very stable and not very resource hungry.
It's my second machine, a 10 years old laptop.

Last edited by The Kid; 06-17-2021 at 01:26 PM. Reason: forgot something
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Old 06-20-2021, 03:27 AM   #2
4duhwinnn
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I have two AVLinux, two Ubuntu Studio, Bodhi, PCLinuxOS, and 2 Puppy linux, (Studio 1337 and Bionic64). On AVLinux and PCLinuxOS, I use Enlightenment as system gui. On the second (newer) AVLinux, I use the default OpenBox. On Bodhi, I use the default Moksha, a spinoff of Enlightenement. Reaper runs fine in each of these.

Of these, only Bodhi and Bionic64 came as generic distros, the others all had some effort to present a ready-to-record system, and all are successful to that end.

Bodhi has a stripped-down version, which is handy for uncluttered customizing.
Moksha is a small, fast, gorgeous, and friendly user interface, designed for maximum customization.

Ubuntu Studio provides the official nVidia video driver in working order.
Important when complex gui's from a variety of plugin formats are in the same session.

PCLinuxOS is very stable, with excellent kernel and app management, and a fistfull of variants if one prefers KDE, Mate, XFCE, Trinity, OpenBox etc

The Puppy-based distros are small, fast and portable, with savefiles for holding the customized system. Studio 1337 is not in developement, but has a RT kernel, with which the apps have been compiled, so fast it is. Some crucial older apps can still be found used in Puppy releases. Various larger software groupings can be loaded after booting by way of sfs files, that hold all the dependencies, and don't need a permanent home on a system drive.

AVLinux is huge in comparison, with a custom kernel, a full stock of audio software, commercial app demos, and tons of extra system utility capabilities, with support via MX-Linux forums, and has both 64 and 32 bit iso's, so an old computer can still be fired up and productive.

I've used Mint several times in the past, and it was also a fine system, with good support. Linux is energized computer freedom, with versions to suit many requirements. Mac and win OS are quite dull boring in and of themselves,
and have no soul.
Cheers
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Old 06-20-2021, 03:50 AM   #3
The Kid
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Originally Posted by 4duhwinnn View Post
I have two AVLinux, two Ubuntu Studio, Bodhi, PCLinuxOS, and 2 Puppy linux, (Studio 1337 and Bionic64). On AVLinux and PCLinuxOS, I use Enlightenment as system gui. On the second (newer) AVLinux, I use the default OpenBox. On Bodhi, I use the default Moksha, a spinoff of Enlightenement. Reaper runs fine in each of these.

Of these, only Bodhi and Bionic64 came as generic distros, the others all had some effort to present a ready-to-record system, and all are successful to that end.

Bodhi has a stripped-down version, which is handy for uncluttered customizing.
Moksha is a small, fast, gorgeous, and friendly user interface, designed for maximum customization.

Ubuntu Studio provides the official nVidia video driver in working order.
Important when complex gui's from a variety of plugin formats are in the same session.

PCLinuxOS is very stable, with excellent kernel and app management, and a fistfull of variants if one prefers KDE, Mate, XFCE, Trinity, OpenBox etc

The Puppy-based distros are small, fast and portable, with savefiles for holding the customized system. Studio 1337 is not in developement, but has a RT kernel, with which the apps have been compiled, so fast it is. Some crucial older apps can still be found used in Puppy releases. Various larger software groupings can be loaded after booting by way of sfs files, that hold all the dependencies, and don't need a permanent home on a system drive.

AVLinux is huge in comparison, with a custom kernel, a full stock of audio software, commercial app demos, and tons of extra system utility capabilities, with support via MX-Linux forums, and has both 64 and 32 bit iso's, so an old computer can still be fired up and productive.

I've used Mint several times in the past, and it was also a fine system, with good support. Linux is energized computer freedom, with versions to suit many requirements. Mac and win OS are quite dull boring in and of themselves,
and have no soul.
Cheers
wow, that's amazing! I've tried OpenSuse, Debian, Arch, Ubuntu Studio, and Mint. Mint was the one I liked best.
Cheers
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Old 06-20-2021, 07:57 AM   #4
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You can't settle until you've tried Manjaro KDE

I've tried nearly every distro going and Manjaro is by far my favorite followed by MX Linux. The package management of Manjaro (especially with yay) is absolutely outstanding.
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Old 06-20-2021, 02:23 PM   #5
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wow, that's amazing! I've tried OpenSuse, Debian, Arch, Ubuntu Studio, and Mint. Mint was the one I liked best.
Cheers
Kinda like dating that leads to a committed relationship!
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Old 06-20-2021, 03:00 PM   #6
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You can't settle until you've tried Manjaro KDE

I've tried nearly every distro going and Manjaro is by far my favorite followed by MX Linux. The package management of Manjaro (especially with yay) is absolutely outstanding.
Can't beat simple text commands to do such important tasks! With KDE's improvements over the years, little wonder it's a popular choice. There was once a Puppy linux based Arch distro, iso under 200 meg, and speedy. The dev lost interest, or other priorities got in the way.

I'm going to set up an Arch based Garuda Linux this week, when a new drive jumps off the Fed-X truck. Garuda have around 8 versions based on various system gui's, KDE included.

https://garudalinux.org/downloads.html

I think I'll go with the gaming version, in hopes it has the 'vulcan' system in play, that might help some pesky plugin gui issues, like poor shader support etc. The website mentions it uses Plasma, so I think it has KDE under the hood. I'll add xfce as a session option, for Ubuntu-Studio familiarity sake, if session swapping is supported and easy to configure. Or just use their xfce version...
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Old 06-21-2021, 11:43 AM   #7
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Fed-X called this morning, talk about fast shipping...so I tried the Garuda gaming iso, but it's 6.7 gig, and k3b wouldn't touch it, so being in a hurry, I went with the perhaps bland xfce version. Installation was OK, if somewhat slow, but setup was a bit of a mud-wrestle, with errors of corrupt packages, unrecognized pgp keys, and repository conflicts, but the Arch forum content and wiki pages helped me find the solutions, and post-housekeeping, Garuda is performing much better than I had hoped. Manjaro may have been a wiser choice, but I'll give Garuda a shot, and see what falls from the sky. I suppose I'll have to go without cheeseburgers and shakes for a month or two, to get those trouble-shootin hours back on the ole lifespan ticker.
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Old 06-24-2021, 01:41 PM   #8
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Ive been using the GeekosDAW overlay on OpenSUSE and wrapping my head around it slowly. Its essentially a Toolset specifically for Audio production/music making under the OpenSUSE Distribution. Sometimes it feels streamlined, sometimes it feels like Linux is playing with a big toybox of 10 year old toys. Windows has spoiled me. But hopefully when Pipewire fully rolls out, using windows vsts will be somewhat easier, or that future vst code will become platform independant.


I do want to try Ubuntu Studio and Manjaro too, i just will wait til my training wheels are off
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Old 06-24-2021, 02:52 PM   #9
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Pipewire has nothing to do with how well any Windows VST will work in Linux. That's almost 100% on Wine at this point. Pipewire is something completely different. And VSTs will probably always be platform-dependent.

Yabridge already does a great job bridging Windows VST with Wine. The troublesome plugins are mostly those with highly restrictive copy protection (that's the aspect which prevents these plugins from working, not anything else). There's a specific windows DLL used for this kind of thing that Wine doesn't do well, and may never do well for all anyone knows. Most of the "leaps and bounds" of Wine's recent development happened due to gaming. It's doubtful those developers are going to focus on making Waves plugins work in Wine.

It's better that you decide to move on from whatever plugins you can't get to work in Linux. You don't need Waves for instance. There isn't anything so specific they do which can't be done with other plugins.

Use Linux for a while, and guaranteed you'll feel gross going back to Windows 10, as though you need to take a shower.
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Old 06-24-2021, 05:42 PM   #10
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Pipewire has nothing to do with how well any Windows VST will work in Linux. That's almost 100% on Wine at this point. Pipewire is something completely different. And VSTs will probably always be platform-dependent.

Yabridge already does a great job bridging Windows VST with Wine. The troublesome plugins are mostly those with highly restrictive copy protection (that's the aspect which prevents these plugins from working, not anything else). There's a specific windows DLL used for this kind of thing that Wine doesn't do well, and may never do well for all anyone knows. Most of the "leaps and bounds" of Wine's recent development happened due to gaming. It's doubtful those developers are going to focus on making Waves plugins work in Wine.

It's better that you decide to move on from whatever plugins you can't get to work in Linux. You don't need Waves for instance. There isn't anything so specific they do which can't be done with other plugins.

Use Linux for a while, and guaranteed you'll feel gross going back to Windows 10, as though you need to take a shower.
I haven’t used Waves in years. To be honest. The only plug-ins I’m worried about are my NeuralDSP guitar amp sims which I will not give up, my drum software(Perfect Drums) (I can move around in it faster than I’m willing to relearn Hydrogen, which is little more than ModplugTracker with a pretty face yet not in any way as flexible. I don’t work in loops when programming drums at least not a four bar loop. A lot of the time a single rhythmic sequence will be anywhere from 16-32 bars on drums. I’m going to contact the developers of both pieces of software and ask how many licenses would it take for them to make a Linux port. The amp sims alone are worth sticking out for.

Fwiw. I’m running Unbuntu Studio off a thumb drive right now. It brought both my interface and my sound blaster, using both to create a mock 5.1 playback on vlc with touching nothing. That’s impressive.
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Old 06-25-2021, 06:13 AM   #11
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I haven’t used Waves in years. To be honest. The only plug-ins I’m worried about are my NeuralDSP guitar amp sims which I will not give up, my drum software(Perfect Drums) (I can move around in it faster than I’m willing to relearn Hydrogen, which is little more than ModplugTracker with a pretty face yet not in any way as flexible. I don’t work in loops when programming drums at least not a four bar loop. A lot of the time a single rhythmic sequence will be anywhere from 16-32 bars on drums. I’m going to contact the developers of both pieces of software and ask how many licenses would it take for them to make a Linux port. The amp sims alone are worth sticking out for.

Fwiw. I’m running Unbuntu Studio off a thumb drive right now. It brought both my interface and my sound blaster, using both to create a mock 5.1 playback on vlc with touching nothing. That’s impressive.
Perfect Drums worked for me as well as ADD2, EZD2 and SSD5.5 all worked for me. Only EZD2 had a little video glitch but still worked.
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Old 06-25-2021, 03:15 PM   #12
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That video glitch is due to some library in Wine. I wasn't able to make an override of the appropriate library (gdiplus) using winecfg since I was trying to add the library with Winetricks. Winetricks didn't have the proper link to the file to download from MS. It seems the file download link for that library in Winetricks was outdated, so Winetricks timed out when trying to download it, and the Winetricks people hadn't updated Winetricks to replace the link. (Note: this may have been updated/fixed since I had done my testing of that plugin.)

As a workaround I discovered if I set Wine compatibility mode to Windows XP in winecfg, that removes the graphics glitch. It forces software graphics rendering (no hardware acceleration), from what I'm told.

If setting your Wine compatibility mode to Windows XP isn't great for your other plugins, you can make separate Wine prefixes easily and keep EZDrummer in its own prefix set for Windows XP compatibility (while running plugins in other Wine prefixes set to other Windows compatibility modes, using them simultaneously in the same Reaper project without problems). I chatted with Robbert about this.

Anyway Superior Drummer 3 works well in Yabridge/Wine without that graphics glitch. I'm guessing SD3 is made of newer code in general, based on later Windows libraries.

@Bjorn: Yabridge/Wine does work very well, if the plugin doesn't need something like what Waves does or iLok etc. Now is probably a good time to try. Manjaro makes it a bit easier for adding Yabridge since it's in the main repo (and the git aka "bleeding edge" updated version is in the AUR). Plus the wine-tkg builds (a Wine fork with some of the latest improvements) are available as Arch packages from their Github. Setting up Wine and Yabridge couldn't be easier on any other distro as far as I can tell.

The idea of the AUR (accessing it from a graphical package manager such as Pamac aka "Add/Remove Software" in Manjaro): for things that aren't in the main repo, and you'd otherwise have to download and build/install yourself: if it's in the AUR, the package manager will do that for you. The main repo does have a lot of things, since it's an Arch-based distro, so for the most part you won't need to use the AUR. But it's nice to have. It's a lot better than Debian-based and Ubuntu-based distros for this.

That, plus the fact Manjaro (due to its Arch base and repo) is very up-to-date for its softwre (but not so bleeding edge that it breaks things): it's what I'd recommend to most people. In particular I like the KDE version since it has more modern features and better organization of the settings. Previously I used XFCE because KDE had some issues to resolve. It seems it's all good now though.

Anyway if you're going to try Wine/Yabridge, you should probably stick with a Wine version 6.4 whether it's the "staging" branch, the normal branch, or wine-tkg. Versions later than that have some issues that affect some plugins. What I do is get the wine-tkg 6.4 package from the Github and install that. I run winecfg in Terminal and change whatever settings I need. I add Winetricks (from the package manager) and use it when/if I need to change something more in-depth. Then install Yabridge from the package manager (I use the version in the AUR to get the most current build). To use the AUR in the package manager, you have to enable it in the settings for the package manager.

Last edited by JamesPeters; 06-25-2021 at 03:42 PM.
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Old 06-27-2021, 12:28 AM   #13
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@Bjorn: Yabridge/Wine does work very well, if the plugin doesn't need something like what Waves does or iLok etc. Now is probably a good time to try. Manjaro makes it a bit easier for adding Yabridge since it's in the main repo (and the git aka "bleeding edge" updated version is in the AUR). Plus the wine-tkg builds (a Wine fork with some of the latest improvements) are available as Arch packages from their Github. Setting up Wine and Yabridge couldn't be easier on any other distro as far as I can tell.

The idea of the AUR (accessing it from a graphical package manager such as Pamac aka "Add/Remove Software" in Manjaro): for things that aren't in the main repo, and you'd otherwise have to download and build/install yourself: if it's in the AUR, the package manager will do that for you. The main repo does have a lot of things, since it's an Arch-based distro, so for the most part you won't need to use the AUR. But it's nice to have. It's a lot better than Debian-based and Ubuntu-based distros for this.

That, plus the fact Manjaro (due to its Arch base and repo) is very up-to-date for its softwre (but not so bleeding edge that it breaks things): it's what I'd recommend to most people. In particular I like the KDE version since it has more modern features and better organization of the settings. Previously I used XFCE because KDE had some issues to resolve. It seems it's all good now though.

Anyway if you're going to try Wine/Yabridge, you should probably stick with a Wine version 6.4 whether it's the "staging" branch, the normal branch, or wine-tkg. Versions later than that have some issues that affect some plugins. What I do is get the wine-tkg 6.4 package from the Github and install that. I run winecfg in Terminal and change whatever settings I need. I add Winetricks (from the package manager) and use it when/if I need to change something more in-depth. Then install Yabridge from the package manager (I use the version in the AUR to get the most current build). To use the AUR in the package manager, you have to enable it in the settings for the package manager.

Im looking and not sure i can use Yabridge and looking into wine. As of right now I cant get Wine to work at all. I just got Pipewire up and working properly and that was a task. Not reverting just for windows plugins. Ill record in windows and use the stems in linux til Linux comes up to speed with Audio production. I am already irritated at Hydrogen, which acts more like a Tracker than modern Drum software. It is even not as high speed as Fruity Loops Which I look at as archaic. Mainly as I am used to multisample drums with 8-9+ sample round robins. Anything less is for EDM than being able to replicate analog instruments.


those arent bad things, they are just not my needs and I am probably in a minority over that. So I use what works fast and sounds right until such time as Linux audio takes over windows. But its hella fun being the annoying one scoffing some when they are discussing tech that was common place in audio production 10 years ago. Its also easy to speak directly with some of the smaller software companies on the communities behalf and asking what they would need to build a port. A few have said that as long as people would buy the package they would port it. Not enough need it yet, or have experienced how easy some pieces of software is now. While there are some that are astonishingly complicated like that reverb software I posted about a few months back.
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Old 07-10-2021, 08:59 AM   #14
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wow, that's amazing! I've tried OpenSuse, Debian, Arch, Ubuntu Studio, and Mint. Mint was the one I liked best.
Cheers
I wanted to use OpenSuse too, as I really really like the chameleon logo.
However, each year I try to install it when I'm in a bore, and for some reason it never works out properly. There's always some error and troubleshooting, this time it was the graphics card that wasn't recognized.

I first started Linux with Sabayon, then Ubuntu Studio, I think I tried Manjaro or MX once too, but it wasn't my cup of tea.

Anyway, I'm using Mint and stick with it already 5 years or so, very very happy.

Tried lots of DAW's too LMMS and Ardour were nice to play with too.
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Old 07-10-2021, 12:31 PM   #15
4duhwinnn
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Thanks for the drum product info, the example sounds great! I spent some time with Arch Garuda spinoff last night. The bauh package manager is a big help. Nice that it even builds packages from AUR and installs them.
No Ubuntus were killed or injured during the process.

Also very nice that it installed

Vital
Surge
Odin2
Yoshimi
Dexed

as well as Hydrogen, Patroneo etc Lots of synth power and variety there.

Cheers
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Old 07-10-2021, 12:49 PM   #16
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No problem!

Oh also: there's no license files, challenge/response or anything for the Ugritone stuff. Put the VST files where they need to go, put the kit files wherever makes sense, then point the plugin to the sample directory and preset directory.

Yeah having AUR packages build automatically is great. I think all Arch-based package managers that work with AUR will do that (I use Pamac).

I'll probably stick to Arch-based distros for that, the selection of software, and how up-to-date it is.
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Old 07-11-2021, 12:40 PM   #17
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Funny thing is, I've been deleting the Ugritone email ads without a thought, along with the rest of the goodies that the bill collector frowns on. The most recent one caught my eye since it's in the frame now, so I wandered over to their site, and found a 2-cheeseburger drumkit, so why not? I'm still a bit too fat, and I'd rather have new drums. But right after purchase, they pulled the old '25% off any purchase in the next 600 seconds' bit, so I was suckered in to getting the main KVLT II for 3-cheeseburgers. I spent some happy hours testing and recording with dual-arpeggiators playing drums in random and various patterned modes. If I weren't so hungry, I'd say "Thanks for the tip".
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Old 07-11-2021, 01:50 PM   #18
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Lol. Yeah their site and email marketing is aggressive. I removed myself from the newsletter after one day, due to having received several emails already by that point. At least unsubscribing works properly without a hassle.

Since you bought KVLT II, I assume you'll get an email when the updated version of its drumkit is released as a "new" expansion, including the updated "Ugritone Drums" Linux VST plugin, as a free update. If not, I'd bug them about it at that point. It seems they're planning to do this, based on what they're saying.
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Old 07-11-2021, 03:20 PM   #19
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Well, since the OP asked...

I run Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Why? because it's well supported and most of the devs that comment about which distro they build against say they build against Ubuntu.

I think everyone should use what works for best them. I suggest you experiment, try the distros that community members have had good experiences with (and other distros too, if you're adventurous) and go for it!
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