Hey there Linux community. I’ve been interested in Linux lately and have been considering switching to Linux Mint from windows 11. My main pc is a Surface Laptop Studio with an intel i7, 32g ram, 1 terabyte ssd, and an rtx 3050 ti gpu. I’m thinking about trying out dual booting to see how I like it, but I have some questions.
I use my laptop for a lot of creative work, video editing, web design, music production, photography, etc. I’m not too worried about it because I’ve come across many promising FOSS alternatives, but there’s some software I’d like to ask about specifically. I ditched Adobe Premiere in favor of Davinci Resolve a while ago and I know that there’s a native Linux version of Resolve, and I’m just curious about how well that runs for the people that use it?
As far as music production goes I’m an avid user of Ableton Live. It’s been my go to for years and I know that support for it on Linux isn’t the best, if it’s even there at all. I’ve seen a few people claim they’ve gotten it working but it seems a little suspicious to me. So to anyone in the music space, what are the best Linux supported alternatives? Or, in the event I decide to switch, should I maintain my dual boot setup to just stick with Ableton?
I’m also pretty locked into the Microsoft ecosystem with OneDrive (I get a terabyte of cloud storage for free so it’s where almost all of my files are). I’m in the process of trying to setup my own cloud storage with nextcloud or something similar, but until then I’m curious if I’d be able to set up OneDrive live file syncing in my Linux environment, similar to how it works on windows? If anyone has any experience with that I’d love to hear some input.
Not something that’s absolutely necessary, but I’m just curious if the touch support of my laptop would be maintained. Since it’s a surface device it’s actually a really nice touch screen, and the pen input is great, my wife borrows it for digital drawing sometimes and loves it. I don’t use it all the time but I do occasionally and it’d be a huge plus if it still worked just as well.
I think those are pretty much the only things holding me back from fully dedicating myself to switching, so I’d really appreciate some input. Thanks!
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I support what some of the people here say: don’t do a hard switch.
Install Linux in dual boot (or, if possible, use a dedicated machine) and see how it goes. You can always fallback to Windows if needed.
My 2 cents:
- Stick to one distro/DE combination, otherwise you’ll get burnt out by decision fatigue. As a beginner I suggest to stick to Ubuntu LTS as a base and KDE as a DE. These are very mature options and IMO everything you’ll ever need until you become an expert (and then you can start exploring more DEs combinations and/or use more advanced distros like Arch). My suggestions: KDE Neon or Kubuntu LTS.
- In terms of software I can suggest Kdenlive for basic video editing, DaVinci Resolve for pro video editing, REAPER as a full featured DAW, Bitwig Studio as an Ableton Live replacement. For image editing I know that GIMP 3.0 is coming and seems promising as a semi-pro alternative. These options comes with native support on Linux and many of them are professional-grade software choices.
- In terms of OneDrive, there’s no Linux client AFAIK. If you are not interested in syncing the files locally, you can use the web version, but it’s not ideal. As an alternative, you can use something like rclone to sync files to/from OneDrive, but requires some setup work.
For Surface hardware compatibility, check this out. I have a fully working touchscreen, pen and all, on my Surface Pro 4 running Mint thanks to this project. Essentially, it’s just a different kernel you install through your package manager that replaces the default for your distro. Let me know if you have any questions. https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/
I have been on Linux for like half a year now, started with linux Mint, switched to Plasma for a proper clipboard manager, and switched again to Fedora for performance.
and one thing I can tell you: If you need to do professional-level stuff you will need windows.And also don’t switch to Fedora (you need extensions to do some basic stuff, and because of Wayland not everything works easily (e.g activity watch))
Plasma is KDE, it’s a desktop environment… So it would be comparable to “Cinnamon” or “MATE” for Linux Mint (I believe. I’ve never used Mint), not Fedora or Mint (which are distros).
You should be able to run Fedora with KDE and Wayland should work (unless it’s a hardware compatibility issue).
Have you looked into something like Atlas OS?
One thing you could do that I don’t see mentioned here is to install Virtual Box in Windows and create a Linux Mint Virtual Machine. It’s basically installing a computer within a computer. You should be able to find some tutorials online.
This would let you try Linux Mint in a sandbox within Windows so that you could experiment a bit with everything before changing anything.
Just keep in mind that within the VM, things will be less performant, especially graphically, and certain peripherals, etc. might not work. But it would let you test out installing the software you want, the cloud storage solution you want, browsing around, etc.
Speaking of graphics, you’ll want to do some research about how well supported your GPU is. It will almost certainly “work” out of the box, but if you want to get the most performance out of it, like Windows, you’re going to need special drivers. I’ve heard Nvidia can be a bit of a pain, but I think it varies by model.
I wouldn’t be too worried about the touch screen as that will probably work - or at least has on every laptop I’ve tried. I’ve had more issues with things like fingerprint scanners generally speaking. Definitely check out everything you can think of when you install, like Bluetooth, cameras, microphone, peripherals, etc. Oh and when using the laptop definitely manually knock yourself down out of performance mode using the upper-righthand corner in gnome. For me at least, it makes a huge difference in battery life if I’m in performance vs balanced vs power saver. Windows is better at automatically making those adjustments.
I’ve also heard that lately Microsoft is making dual-boot harder - notably that Windows updates will just casually break your dual-boot and revert it to just Windows. I don’t know the details since it’s been years since I’ve done it myself, but something to keep in mind.
Finally I’ll throw out there to make sure you have a recovery plan if the install goes south. Have all your files backed up. Have a copy of Linux and Windows installers ready. It honestly should be fine, but especially if this is your only PC you don’t want to be stuck if you have some kind of issue, accidentally blow away your laptop’s SSD, etc . Not trying to scare you or anything, but better safe than sorry, right?
That’s the way I discovered Linux in 2004. I wanted a VoIP system and so installed asterisk@home into a VM on Windows 2000 server.
Once I discovered how good it is, the W2000 was replaced by Debian.
Well, you can use Of365 online. Same with OneDrive. Some desktops even allow you to connect your MS account to the desktop (Gnome).
As far as music production goes I’m an avid user of Ableton Live.
Install Windows into VMware player, then install this into it.
Not something that’s absolutely necessary, but I’m just curious if the touch support of my laptop would be maintained.
It will be maintained.
rtx 3050 ti
Nvidia is fixing their mistakes on Linux day by day. I have a GTX 1660 super running under Fedora and it works well.
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Install Windows into VMware player, then install this into it.
Why? We have native VM capabilities in the kernel and VirtualManager is very simple to understand and use.
It souds like this is literally your first step outside of windows.
Don’t listen to any of these people, stick to dual boot, especially if your quality of life (I mean your hobbies) are tied to mastery of a known ecosystem of specific softwares.
Linux can work but you will need to compromise, and you will royally fuck up and unless you are embracing troubleshooting as an hobby you won’t like it.
Dual booting allows you to have a safe harbor for when things go south.
I’ve had a dual boot for around 6 years and only this year I have, not deleted windows but set up my boot to default to linux (it used to be last OS booted).
I had to give up the quality of some audio filters for streaming, I coud not for the life of me figure out how to run a couple of specific games, I’m unable to uncompress big .exe archives (yarrr) in certain specific disks and after a year of smooth daily sailing I had my drivers go nuts and had to dive in and fix it, doing research on old shitty reliable windows.
I would very much agree here. I’ve (admittedly mostly server side) been using linux for around 30 years now. But I’m still dual booting on my desktop. There’s just a few things that will still only work in Linux, and also if I break things I can go to windows if I need to do something “right now”
Dual boot gives you the option of, if you have the time trying to make something work in linux. But, if you don’t have the time, just boot to windows and do it.
How I do things, is I have drives that are shared between both OS (I use btrfs since there is a windows driver and, so far (around 3 years) I’ve had no corruption problems. But you can share ntfs too and a boot drive for both. But, it’s not a requirement.
Also yes, it is quite easy to break a linux install. It’s not really because Linux is bad. It’s just because you have so much choice in which drivers to use, which desktop environment (and even the components that make it up) that it’s easy to accidentally select some combination that doesn’t work and you end up with only a console to fix things from.
I like that the OP is choosing Mint. I’ve not used Mint, but from all I’ve seen it looks a real good option for someone starting into Linux from no experience.
IF all else fails, use a Windows VM.
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On the topic of audio production, here are your options:
Commercial DAW apps available on Linux: Traction Waveform Reaper BitWig Studio Presonus Studio One (beta) Harrison MixBus (based on Ardour) ReNoise (tracker/daw hybrid)
Available sources but commercial binaries: ZRythm (currently in beta) Ardour (can be found for free on the repos of most distros)
Completely free: LMMS (recording live instruments is available via the latest nightly build, but no vst3 support) QTractor Stargate MusE Rosegarden Traverso (active again this year) Ossia Score
Audacity (audio rec/editor) MilkyTracker (tracker) SoundTracker (tracker)
Hydrogen (drum machine) Cecilia (audio signal processing) Mixxx (live DJ)
To get these working, install pipewire-jack on your distro and enable some audio group privilliges, so you don’t get cracking sounds. There are tutorials on how to set that up. Also use the qwpgraph app to create audio connections (otherwise, you might not hear anything coming from your speakers on some plugins/apps). My favorite free daw on Linux is Ardour. Reaper if I want to get more involved.
There are a number of native Linux plugins that should be prefered, but if you want to run specifically Windows plugins, you will have to install Wine and then Yabridge. Yabridge acts as a bridge between the .dll plugin files in a Wine environment (that is setup as if it’s Windows), and serves .so Linux plugins that Linux DAWs can understand. This is obviously quite flaky. Different versions of wine will support different plugins. Sometimes, a plugin works, you upgrade wine, and it no longer works (but some other plugin now works, that didn’t used to be fore). Some people are happy though with yabrdige and wine. I find it a pain…
I’d suggest you go with Fedora, so Resolve works easier than it would on a Debian-based OS. Also, Yabrdige is currently broken on ubuntu. The dev said he might fix it by the end of the year, but who knows. I’m personally ubuntu-based and I’m still telling you to use fedora to get that stuff working for now. Although, you might want to try the UbuntuStudio flavor. It might have some of that stuff fixed.
For photography, use Darktable. For raster editing, use Gimp 3.0-alpha (the 2.10 version is not that good for people coming from photoshop/windows IMHO as it lacks adjustment layers), and Photopea on the web browser. For vectors, inkscape, or online, boxy-svg.com.
For an After Effects clone, there’s a brand new app, Friction: https://friction.graphics/
For a video compositor, if you’re not going to use Resolve’s Fusion, there’s Natron (Nuke clone ui-wise).
For digital painting, there’s Krita.
For 2D animation, there’s Krita & Friction above, but also Pencil2D and SynfigStudio (latest version .appimages on their respective sites).
I’m not familiar for apps regarding web design though. There’s Bluefish for html editing, and you can use sublime-edit for other code-writing.
For Office, LibreOffice comes by default in most distros, however, the highest compatibility rate with MS formats is via OnlyOffice. You can download an .appimage on their website for free. That app will let you create proper PDFs too (with forms etc). To run appimages, download them, right click to go to their file properties, and there make them executable. Then double click them to run.
For 2D CAD, use QCAD (you can download it from their site, and then remove the .so files it directs you to, to turn it from demo/evaluation to the completely free version (that’s missing some format support, but otherwise fully functional). For 3D CAD, there’s the RC2 version of FreeCAD.
And for 3D stuff, there’s Blender. Latest version available on their site in binary form.
Finally, if you’re not doing highly advanced color grading, or you don’t need your videos to be color managed, then both Kdenlive, and Shotcut are very good, hassle-free video editors. You can download their .appimage file for latest versions from their site.
Available sources but commercial binaries: ZRythm (currently in beta) Ardour (can be found for free on the repos of most distros)
Isn’t Ardour GPLv2, and not only source available?
My sentence above explains it. The source is available, the distros provide binaries in their repos, but if you want the latest version, the creator only provides paid binaries. The GPL allows for that. Same for ZRythm.
“The Only caveat is that the free version of DR on Linux can’t work with H.264 or H.265 encoded files.” this actually again depends upon ffmpeg and can be fixed by compiling these protocols into it. The free version does whatever ffmpeg does because it uses it for it’s codec.
My understanding is that Resolve is not using ffmpeg on linux, it’s using its own codecs.
Davinci Resolve works just fine for me on Linux, and if you’ve got an Nvidia card and install the proprietary drivers it should be fine too. The Only caveat is that the free version of DR on Linux can’t work with H.264 or H.265 encoded files. It can ingest AV1 encoded files, but, at least my install of DR 19 doesn’t show an option to export AV1, only codecs like DNxHR or ProRes or Cineform. As long as you’re not in a real time crunch or anything, you may have to allocate time in your workflow to do a separate file conversion after exporting from DR with ffmpeg or Handbrake or something if you need either of those.
Here is the list of supported codecs for DR 19. They only list Rocky Linux as officially supported, but it works just fine for me on Fedora Linux, and the installer doesn’t seem to be specific to any type of package manager. (For anyone reading this with an AMD card, if you install rocm-opencl, DR will work with that, even though they only talk about Nvidia and CUDA)
As for OneDrive, there’s a tool called rclone that can be used to, among other things, mount cloud storage services as folders. I think it was kinda broken for OneDrive a while ago (or MS broke support for it, im not sure lol), but you could look into that. I never really used OneDrive much, so I can’t speak much about my experience with it.
Like others have said, reaper runs very smooth on linux. I’ve been using it for years now and it has been a rock solid experience. The rare times it freezes, is almost always due to windows vsts I’m running through a bridge.
I tried ableton through wine but that was not the best. Also, it was ages ago so it might be better or worse now. Bitwig looks pretty good and I’ve read good things about it as well.
If you’re into max for live, definitely try out puredata. It’s my main music tool now, together with sooperlooper and reaper.
As for distribution, I would go with debian. It’s a bit older but has never let me down. Coming from Windows I think the KDE desktop environment would feel the most user friendly.
Personally I would not do a dual boot. Either wipe the windows partition or swap ssd. It will be more pain free in the future. Windows has a tendency to mess up your linux install which is just plain annoying. Fixing it is always a major hassle.
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For ableton, you can run it in wine and it can work well enough to do things. It’s an OK experience at best and flat out doesn’t work at worst. Kiss your VST plugins goodbye with that though, gotta stick to the built ins which do all work when it’s working overall.
Otherwise, check out bitwig studio, made by ex ableton devs and natively runs in Linux. Still gonna be hit or miss on 3rd party plugins but the app is on par with ableton as an experience. Price in the same range too. Best short explainer is ableton meets logic in terms of usability.
