So sitrep:
Newish desktop
- i7-13700K
- 64Gb DDR5 6000Mhz
- RTX 3070Ti
- MSI PRO Z790-P (WiFi is not a factor, permanent ethernet connection.)
Needs:
- Gaming
- Music composing
- Coding (Mostly python)
- Video editing
I’ve been using Linux on and off throughout the years, but lately I’ve fallen out of the loop somewhat. Started with Slackware around 1998, Kubuntu in the 2000’s, Ubuntu 2010’s, Kali and Mandrake 2020’s -> on my laptop, Ubuntu server on my RasPi. At work, we have a few Fedora servers I have to maintain. So not a complete novice, but somewhat obsolete info.
I have been looking at the immutable distros, like Bazzite and Pop!_OS as I’ve done the whole song and dance of constantly repairing my distro because of various issues, and I’d like my main recreational machine & distro to be low maintenance, I get to fix linux servers at work enough already, I don’t want to bring that home.
With gaming, I’ve understood that linux has come a loooooong way since I last tried sometime around TBC Launch for WoW when Wine barely worked with it.
Music composing is a little annoying, since apparently both Ableton and FL studio are not an option. I’ve heard good things about Reaper, but I’ll have to do some more research. Feel free to educate me on this topic if you have some insider info. I don’t play live sets, just compose and mix.
Video editing, currently I use Davinci Resolve, and apparently it works fine on Linux, just some limitations and shenanigans with codecs. Alternatives are welcome, I don’t need 90% of what resolve offers, I can make do with a simpler software as well.
Thank you kindly in advance for departing thine wisdom.
If your primary usecase is going to be music (so a need for realtime capabilities for stuff like recording, VSTs and DAWs) then I do not reccomend immutable distros for a simple reason: you will probably/eventually need to hack something up to get it to work and at that moment, the immutability is just extra work.
As far as I have tried fiddling with the music stack on Linux (which is not that much), the whole pipewire/JACK/carla stack is a bit messy and I can’t imagine it working with flatpacks due to the sandboxing/permissions.
Aye, audio latency was a big question I didn’t find a good answer for during my research period. It is a headache on Windows as well.
You do make a really good point I didn’t think about the immutables for music stuff. Cheers for that.
Check out the Arch wiki page for Professional Audio, it’s got some great distro-agnostic tips for reducing latency.