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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Don’t use Onedrive, Dropbox or Google Drive (all privacy nightmares). Instead:
- Self-host https://nextcloud.com/ (this is the gold standard of self-hosting a secure and private cloud storage, you just need your own server with the disk space you need. Open source)
- P2P and/or self-host https://syncthing.net/ (this will automatically sync files in shared folders between several devices. Best if you have one device which is online all the time. Will use the space on your own devices. Open source)
- Storage on a trustworthy 3rd party host: https://proton.me/drive (this is the most similar to Onedrive/etc. where you sync your stuff to their servers, so you don’t need to host anything, but contrary to anything from Google/MS/Dropbox, this is at least a reputable and secure/private host which doesn’t abuse or sell your data. Data is encrypted by default. Also open source)
Furthermore, accessing Onedrive from Linux might be painfully inconvenient because there’s no official proprietary client for it by MS. There are 3rd party clients but I’m not sure how good they are, also MS could at any point change their API or even block unofficial clients, rendering your unofficial client useless at least for a time period.
There’s Gnome integration.
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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.
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.
Thanks for the clarification :)
Somewhat depends on the version of Linux you have. The ffmpeg build that is included with Ubuntu 24.04 for example is really an incomplete build and as a result there aren’t a lot of encoding / decoding options with any software that utilizes it for encoding and decoding, this includes Davinci Resolve and also kdenlive and for vlc playback. There is a fix for this but it is arduous, download ffmpeg from github and compile from scratch. Enable all the libs and codecs except for the MacOS specific ones. Now the fun part, run the configure script, it will break af the first missing lib, install that. Some libs you will also need to download source and compile from github at least with ubuntu because it’s not included in the distro. You will need to do this around 300 times because the moron that wrote the ffmpeg configure script, instead of listing ALL the libs missing so you could snatch them and install in one go, bombs out at the first, so you have to go through 300 or so iterations. I’ve done it, it’s painful, but at the end you end up with a much more capable ffmpeg and by extension Davinci Resolve than the pile of crap they provided you with.
Can’t you just install ffmpeg from a PPA rather than compile it yourself?
@entropicdrift It is not a complete build, many codecs are not compiled in.
There are PPAs with different builds of ffmpeg for Ubuntu. It also depends what codecs are needed as to whether this is even relevant?
Bearing in mind some (many) encoding codec libraries are not installed by default as most people don’t need them but can readily be added from the official repos via apt or synaotic. Each codec is usually provided as a library of its own; ffmpeg is more than just one set of binaries. There is a big difference between an incomplete build and incomplete default install of all available libraries/codecs. Most people don’t need or want every possible encoding codec installed by default.
However some codecs are more strictly licensed and may need to be installed or acquired via different routes - that is the nature or proprietary software (as on Windows).
Which codes are you saying are not available in Ubuntu official repos?
Sorry, there are no PPAs that have all codecs compiled in? Is it illegal to distribute or something?
@entropicdrift Not that I am aware of, I searched for some before I went to the effort of chasing down all the libraries and compiling myself and wasn’t successful at finding one.
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.
Because VMware does allow you to use GPU acceleration with passing through a GPU. And as far as I am aware, virt-manager doesn’t have this feature.
So do the enterprise version work with a regular Win 11 (or Win 10 Pro) licence?
For what it is worth, I have a laptop with a touchscreen, Ubuntu Mate works wonderfully on it.
“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.
@eugenia I believe this is true for the paid version but I believe the free version does.
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.
I don’t have specific experience with the tools you list, however on googling it looks like Ableton Live does work under wine. Wine is what underpins playing windows games on Linux too; it’s very powerful and effective.
You can install Mint into a VM environment on your current PC (such as Virtual Box) and see how you get on with software you really can’t live without. It won’t run as fast as real life in a VM but you should get an idea whether any tools you can’t live without can work.
As for OneDrive there are unofficial clients to get it working with Linux if you want to sync to your local filesystem. However Microsoft doesn’t officially support it beyond Web browsers, so if you want something slick and supported you probably would be better migrating to other solutions. You’d certainly be able to migrate with the unofficial clients but I’m not sure I’d want to rely on them long term as things xna break if Microsoft unilaterally changes something.
As for music production on Linux, I use Reaper. Check it out and see if it meets your needs.
Largest, freshest repo that deals with dependency issues for you!
IF all else fails, use a Windows VM.
Check out Ardour for music production. You should be able to get older versions for free on most distributions or get the current version for a donation via their website.
Have you looked into something like Atlas OS?
