As others have said, I also highly recommend physically separate drives. I have found both Linux and Windows affect each other sometimes especially when you’re getting your bearings with dual booting.
For instance, after running Linux the clock in Windows will be wrong. And Windows will eat the Linux boot partition especially after feature packs (formerly called service packs), which come out about 1-2/year.
Anecdotally I’ve been dual booting Windows 11/Linux on my laptop for a couple years and I’ve never had issues with Windows affecting the boot partition and I feel like this is much less common with EFI. You can even have a separate EFI partition for Linux and choose boot order from the BIOS.
I’ve always done partition based dual booting since I first started using Linux and the last time I remember having an issue with Windows fucking with boot setup was like early/mid 2010s and it’s only happened a couple times in like 10 years of on and off dual booting.
Just install linux 2nd and have it probe foreign OS, and create a linux only boot partition. Grub will then make a chainloader entry to windows boot partition. Linux won’t care if you select windows chainload option, and Windows won’t know it ia being chainloaded. No OS overlap. just set Grub Boot entry as primary boot in BIOS, EFI.
I had been using Linux on servers for years, and finally also decided to give it a shot on the Desktop during the Linux challenge from linustechtips. Went to PopOS first, then Fedora and Debian and am currently on OpenSuse.
My boss at the time (I was a writer for a tech magazine) asked me to review FreeBSD. I couldn’t get it to install (at all) so someone suggested Linux (Slackware) which was an insane idea at the time around 1995 or 1996. Slackware sort of worked, no sound and I had to do various really annoying things to get it to see my modem (which never really worked). But something about it was interesting and I stuck with it.
I’d suggets Void. It has Ardour in the repo (not Reaper though) and PiperWire with JACK should work out of the box. If you want Reaper, you’d have to install it manually though. I’m working on a template for Reaper, but it’s not finished yet. If you’re willing to wait a month or so, you’ll probably have Reaper in xbps-src as well.
I thought most of the FOSS ones were like libraries, just drop them in the adequate shared directory and that’s it 🤔. You could check dependencies with ldd and look for the adequate package with xtools.
They can be dropped into local directories, assuming the devs provide binaries, otherwise they need building. I know it’s not difficult to git clone and build but it’s not really a beginner friendly process and not ideal to have to remember to check for updates (and not ideal to not have them packaged for updates if there are binaries provided by the devs). I was considering using 10 years ago or so and this was one of the main reasons I decided against it in the end (along with other audio tools not having packages), it’s a shame it hasn’t really moved forward in this respect because it looked really nice otherwise.
Well, at least there is one thing that makes building on Void easier. xbps-src works with templates, so you could just write the template or write on GitHub for help from someone in the Void community. I’ve asked for help many times and people are usually very helpful ☺️. Once you have the template, updating the VST is a matter of just chaging a few things in it (version, hash, etc.) since things like UI dependencies or libraries don’t change that often in releases, those are major changes and usually come with a prior warning by the developer. Meaning, you could just make the template and just change the version numbers and hashes, recompile it and most of the time, that will be just that, bam, you’re up to date ☺️. Sure, there are major updates, but let’s face it, there are very rare. And, you can share the template with others on the official void xbps-src repo or your own repo, however you like 😉. Hell, you could even share the binaries so that other people don’t have to go through the trouble of compiling them manually 😉.
Probably like most people here, I just got more and more fed up with Windows. I tried Ubuntu a few times in the past, but it never really stuck, and at the time Windows wasn’t quite as bad (I quite liked Windows 7 in all honesty). But as time went on with Win10, it kept moving in a direction I didn’t want and I kept trying to customize it to my liking, and an update would just mess a bunch of stuff up and just make the whole experience worst. Recently it started having issues with my multiple monitors, shutdown and sleep/hibernate were basically broken, Bluetooth would randomly stop working, it was just a lot of aggravation.
I’m only a few weeks into my grand Linux adventure, but I’ve got almost all of the functionality that I need from Windows with none of the frustrations, and it’s way faster on top of that. Right now I can’t see myself going back.
Not a luxury. A 128 GB SSD can be bought for about $25 (last year) or even cheaper now, and you buy once for many years, as home users write a lot less on SSDs.
Partitioning is great with a boot partition for each OS,and linux chainloading to windows. Then I have aseparate NTFS drive as secondary drive in Windows and Linux, in case I need to work on data in either OS
And when’s the last time that happened to you? I have Windows and Linux on my UEFI laptop on the same disk since 2020 and never had that happen on Windows 10 and 11.
Windows wont if you set two independent boot partitions, and you chainload from kinux grub to windows. windows never realizes there is another boot partition. Grub is your BIOS EFI default and Grub has an entry to kickoff windows boot. You can even boot to linux right after what ahould be a windows update restart, do your linux work and when you kickoff windows again the reatart and update continues. i have had this setup since 2017.
I taught myself some shell scripting and unix commands after being gifted an iMac running 10.3. I then decided I wanted to fully immerse myself, so I dual booted that thing with OpenBSD.
The installer back then was pretty barebones; I used a scientific calculator to set up the partitions. After install I was dropped into a root shell and had to recompile the kernel to apply the latest system patches, then set up my user account, sudo, and bootstrap the package installer.
Getting the latest Firefox meant compiling it from scratch, which took about a week. Setting up flash involved configuring a Linux emulation layer. It worked on most sites, but not others.
I began pining for the binary updates, native flash support, and huge package libraries available in Linux, not to mention the cool wobbly window cube that compiz fusion offered, so I made the jump to Linux.
I’ve switched distros and even switched to other unix-likes, but in the end Linux won for me.
For my main computers, I’ve moved them all to Arch from Manjaro & EndeavorOS within the past 4 years. Though been meaning to try OpenSUSE Tumbleweed eventually. Haven’t used OpenSUSE in over 10 years.
I have a laptop running Proxmox for my servers, which is debian-based but uses a modified Ubuntu LTS kernel. Great to use to try out other distros in VMs as well.
For work the only thing that holds me back from using Linux is Office 365. The web apps for O365 are just not up to par for anything other than the most basic tasks.
Using prospect mail, Thunderbird with Owl for Exchange or one of the myriad other email clients as well as teams for Linux (obviously for teams) solved the issue for me. Actual productivity apps, I’ve always preferred the extensibility of libre office but there’s also kingsoft office, open office, etc.
Fortunately my work uses Google docs mostly. We do have office 365 and use it for mail and their PWA is really decent.
I keep a domain bound kernel virtual machine sitting around mostly for directory services. I installed 0365 and all the supporting apps just in case I ever have a need. The real b**** of the whole thing is that Windows 11 needs a minimum of 60 gigs of storage.
This is what I use for switching: pastebin.com/J5VT03eq
It uses pactl (should work with both Pulse and pipewire-pulse) and KDialog to list available sinks.
First off, I want to make it clear that the distro doesn’t really matter. Different distros are just what it comes pre-packed with by default.
TLDR:
For something easy to use: Linux Mint
For something that has pre-installed audio software (but maybe not the ones you want): Ubuntu Studio
If you want to build your system from scratch: Debian (or Arch if you want the latest and greatest software, and don’t mind the occasional update breaking your system around once a year or so, and needing to spend an hour fixing it)
Regardless of which distro you get, use JACK or PipeWire for your sound server. PulseAudio (on its own) has too much latency.
More details:
I first tried Ubuntu Studio. It comes with a lot of software related to audio production. But I found it to be insanely slow, and it didn’t even come with Reaper anyway.
I tried OpenSUSE because I liked that it had the option to manually deselect the software you don’t want (and I was too much of a beginner to know how to pick my packages from the ground-up). It worked well.
Eventually I moved to Debian. I didn’t want any of the extra fluff and found it was pretty easy to choose everything myself. One thing that’s important is that you don’t want to use PulseAudio. Either use JACK (which I think needs to be used in conjunction with PulseAudio actually) or use PipeWire, which is what I use.
For any Windows software, use Bottles to emulate them on Linux. I actually ended up needing to go back to windows because of one audio software: Wwise. There was no way of running it in Linux. A VM probably would’ve worked, but that would’ve been a massive hassle for how I’d need to use it.
I didn’t get to spend too too much time doing pro audio on linux because as soon as I realized Wwise will not work, I didn’t spend much more time in Reaper after that. But it was good, especially with an audio interface (if you’re buying an audio interface, check to see how well it works with linux. Apparently some may have issues)
By the way, the whole point of Debian is that it has older software, and in exchange you’re almost guaranteed to have a system that doesn’t break. But for some professional software you’ll want the newest version. I recommend using Flatpak for that stuff instead of Apt (like for Reaper)
When installing Debian, when it asks “Allow login as root?” be sure to select “no”. This one step is why some people don’t recommend Debian, saying it complicates the install process. But if you get that right, then you’re all good. Or I think sometimes it will instead ask you to create and type in a root password, in which case you should leave it blank and click next. You only want to make a password for your user, not for the root.
As an aside, distro doesn’t matter but should make sure realtime is set up properly for the optimal latency. That usually requires the linux-rt kernel. The default one isn’t quite as bad as it used to be, but linux-rt will be able to guarantee low latency processing without dropouts. Also worth tuning/hardcoding latencies in JACK or PipeWire if the audio delay is too big out of the box.
Be aware that Windows will snitch on you if you run it in a VM. I don’t know about Forkknife in particular, but if a game’s TOS prohibits it, or the anti-cheat is having a bad day, it might get you banned. There are ways to trick Windows into thinking it’s running on metal, but it’s always a risk.
Windows doesn’t “snitch” on you. Invasive anti-cheat measures demand to act as a root-kit on your pc that reads out literally everything about your system, including CPU, hardware ID of the mainboard, etc. So of course it will see that it’s installed on a VM and you gave it the right to send that info wherever during installation of the game.
Since the point of this measure is to keep people from evading a ban by reinstalling, it will not like seeing that it’s in a VM.
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