Ex-technologist, now an artist. My art: http://www.eugenialoli.com/

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • There are several commercial options for Linux. The most-Ableton software out there is Bitwig Studio that has a Linux port. However, it’s expensive. The cheapest commercial solution, with a bit of learning curve but powerful nonetheless, is Reaper.

    However, if you want to go 100% open source, there’s Ardour and LMMS (which is a lot like FL Studio). Ardour 9, which is expected by the end of the year, will be more MIDI-friendly than it used to be. LMMS latest git version (offered as binary on their site) has some good new features compared to their stable version, however, there’s still no vst3 support.

    I’m an visual artist and I used Photoshop for years to edit my hand-painted scanned paintings. When I moved to Linux, and Gimp3 was out, I was finally ready to leave Photoshop behind. Some features of Photoshop aren’t there, but I was ready to leave them behind. Same with video, I used to have a rather popular blog about color grading with Resolve. I moved to kdenlive, which has none of these tools or plugins. It’s a decision that I simply had to make. I wanted to use foss tools, and that was the price to pay. I’m cool with my decision.

    If you gotta go commercial, go with Reaper. The people (a small team of 3 or 4 I believe) behind it are really cool, and they’re doing it for the love of it, their profit is very small.





  • The reality is, to get these Windows VSTs to work on Linux, is possible via 2-3 ways, but they’re crashy, and sometimes will work, and after an OS upgrade might stop working (as it happened last year with yabridge under ubuntu) etc. The truth is, you can’t rely 100% on these VSTs anymore under Linux, it’s too hairy of a situation overtime. You might be able to get it working for a project, and two years later to try to reload that project, only to have these plugins not working anymore, so the project would crash on you and not be able to load it anymore.

    If you want to switch to Linux, you will need to use the well supported, native plugins only that get updated regularly for new linux versions. Yes, it’s a waste of money for your existing purchases, but this is what’s true for everyone who have ever bought Windows software in the past, and they’re now switching to Linux. Maybe you can sell them?

    Alternatively, use Windows for your audio work, and if you want to stay on Windows 10, make sure that this computer is not on the internet connected anymore (due to not receive security updates anymore), and use Linux for your everyday computer tasks.





  • Yes, I have 2 computers running off of USB with Mint, with persistence. And I’ve set up that for my father in law and a friend too. You boot with one drive, you insert the other one, you UNMOUNT it, and then you load the installer. Please note though, that the bootloader will be installed into the internal drive instead of the usb one. To go around this problem, would be best to disable the internal drive temporarily during installation (either in the bios, or just remove its cable). Then the installer will be forced to write the bootloader on to the usb stick.

    I usually set up the partitions as such: 1 GB of fat32 boot partition with the boot flag set, a 4 GB swap partition, and the rest / (root).


  • Eugenia@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlHelping choosing the right linux
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    26 days ago

    I suggest Linux Mint. It has GUIs for almost everything and it’s very stable. With a little bit of tinkering of the services at startup, you can get Mint to run at 700 MB of RAM (as read via htop), instead of its default ~1 GB of RAM. That could be important to fit it better at 4 GB of ram with some demanding browsing.

    I disagree with anyone who might suggest Fedora or Ubuntu with 4 GB of RAM. These distros require about 2+ GB of RAM to boot up, double than that of Mint.

    Then there are the distros meant for older machines that use less ram, but it’s a shame to use these when your laptop is fast-enough with an 8th gen cpu (comparatively to very old machines, that is). Your CPU scores 3500 points on the passmark cpu benchmark which is enough for any kind of distro. 15 years ago, the average laptop cpu was 600 points (and Linux still runs fine on these with something like Debian/Xfce).

    The lowest ram usage I’ve seen with a full-fledge modern distro/DE, is XFce with endeavourOS. I load it at 490 MB of RAM (it takes 630 MB on Mint for the same layout/apps).

    Basically, your challenge is the RAM, not the CPU or the drive. Use an appropriate distro for the RAM and the difficulty you want, and always be mindful to not have too many tabs/apps open at the same time.






  • Step 1: Use a youtube tutorial for the basic commands. Don’t worry, you’ll forget about them soon enough. But doing them once, helps with muscle memory.

    Step 2: When in need to do something, copy/paste from Q&A/forums various commands that they suggest for your problem. Your basic knowledge from step1 will come back as you do that.

    After a few days, you’ll be understanding what’s going on and how the whole thing works in an abstract level.


  • Eugenia@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlFilmora on Linux
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    2 months ago

    I prefer the UI of Shotcut, but kdenlive is admittedly more powerful. You can try both to see which one you prefer. I suggest you download the .appimage files of both of them from the website (this way you’ll get the latest versions). I’d suggest against the flatpak versions as sometimes they come with limitations of various kinds. Just download their respective .appimage files, make them executable (right click on the downloaded files with your file manager and then go to their Properties to set them as executable), and then double click them to load. If you go that route, make sure you manually update them every 3 months or so, as that’s when they usually release updates.


  • Eugenia@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlFilmora on Linux
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    2 months ago

    Windows apps (particularly ones that require that kind of acceleration) are unlikely to work with Wine. And if they do, either they’ll be crashy, or they can break at any consequent Wine update. Forget Windows apps. Windows games that are invoking only fullscreen 3D are much more likely to work on Linux because the part that gets re-interpreted is simpler. But apps, that use obscure optimization Windows APIs are a pain to get good support of.

    So, I suggest you install kdenlive or Shotcut to do video editing. Even Davinci resolve is a hit or miss on Linux and it doesn’t support AAC at all. So get it done with the two OSS apps I suggested instead. In another life I was a music video director for local bands, and so I was doing a lot of color grading, invoking tricks and things that FOSS apps can’t do. I switched full time to Linux and FOSS apps, and I just do the basic color grading now. It was sad to see that part of the fun go, but that’s what I had to do.

    Additionally Filmora is a primarily Chinese company, probably mining data, so it’s best to not use it. Same for CapCut.