Heeby deeby what about the various ways to build fhs environments in nix. My largest complaint is actually that the nix ecosystem has disjointed, incomplete, and incorrect documentation. You can get through it, but it’s often best to try reading the code in nixpkgs when things aren’t working like the docs say. I’ve been getting by for a few years now and I don’t really even know the nix language, I really should put the time in to learn it but I will when I need to.

I’m very happy with how much nixos just works and doesn’t let me break the whole os just because I want to try the latest version of blender 😅

Nope. I bailed when I read the words NFS and kerberos in the same sentence.

I can confirm focusrite scarlet interfaces work fine, and the uv1 should be fine as well but I don’t have one. You may need to get familiar with the Linux audio landscape. VSTs mostly work these days, although I only use foss VSTs so maybe commercial ones have their own caveats.

For pro audio you should be using JACK to connect your sound devices. These days if you run a system that uses pipewire, pipewire can pretend to be a JACK server just fine. I like to use QJackCtl to set up Jack environments, although its not necessary because many DAWs are capable of setting up in the application.

For a DAW I used to love Ardour, now I still like it but am sad that it has been crashing often for me. I don’t use any of them but there are some well liked Linux daws like reaper.

You may have trouble with recording without a preemptable (aka real-time) kernel. Afaict this only matters on lower end computers or when you have a lot of live plugins running, but using a kernel with this feature just means that more kernel code can be interrupted to handle things like fresh audio data arriving over USB.

Mostly, you’ll need some time to get everything working how you want. I agree with the recommendation to use a separate disk in your existing computer for Linux, or get a whole separate computer. The nice thing about using a separate disk is you can know for sure your windows setup is available if needed. For me I slowly left windows behind, only realizing later that it has been a year or more since I last fired it up.

Would you believe me if I told you this is how conda works? :P

2 that stand out to me:

When I successfully got virtualbox to boot my windows xp partition inside Linux because I needed to run some software for school.

When I figured out how to use qemu-nbd to mount a qcow2 image backed by a physical block device in order to run non-destructive filesystem repair and file recovery with test disk. Did that for a while for my university IT help desk to quickly save files off failing disks.

Linux vtty forever! Can’t cat data into the framebuffer when your desktop is getting in the way!!

Jk I use gnome terminal for everything, or whatever default is available. It’s quite amazing that most of them handle all but the most niche terminal features these days.

When I need to install a terminal emulator for some reason I always go for urxvt… but it is pretty terrible (it’s a great vt but mouse interaction is clunky and graphics are old school) compared to pretty much everything else.

Ya I agree with this

Also notepad++ on wine on Linux … Not my favorite but it’s there

Alternatively, if you can create a new user, you can instead clear your home folder. Usually just requires renaming ~/.config but some systems put config in other places.

Sometimes a short bit of drama is good motivation to actually read the mailing list 😁

Well one day I heard about NixOS… And that’s all it took

Less, then “vim -” after I realize I don’t know how to use less.

If you ever need a reeally stupid way to sanitize deleted data without special privileges, just fill the disk up with some files then delete them. On Linux this is easy with cat and /dev/zero or urandom. Can’t be sure it gets everything but it’s better than doing nothing.