I happen to have a spare 13 year old Thinkpad right now because I bought a new seven year old used Thinkpad. So I wanted to get back to linux with it. Can you tell me what distribution you use right now?
I had mostly different styles of ubuntu ten years ago (xubuntu, ubuntu studio and ubuntu core with fiddly lua scripted awesome-wm). So I don’t necessarilty need a windows-like distribution for adaption. That said I’m maybe used to the ubuntu experience (package management and the lot). I’m tempted chosing between some music related distribution (ubuntu studio, AV-Linux) or making my feet wet with some Arch based distro, with which I have no experience by now. I’m maybe in favor of a rolling release, because I don’t want to reinstall the system after 5 years or so already.
I will continue doing music production with windows, but will do the zynthian related stuff here, plus maybe some code and script stuff.
I know it’s maybe bold to ask for a suggestion on this tiny basis. But I’m curious what you use right now with a similar set of tasks.
Hello, personally, I use Manjaro (derived from Arch/Linux) with the lightweight Xfce window manager. I’ve been using GNU/Linux since 1995. I don’t like Ubuntu-type distributions because I always find them full of bugs. I find Manjaro well-suited for real-time music production, as the kernels are included for this purpose. I’ve written documentation to allow me to configure the distribution according to my music needs (in French). I’ve tried almost all the ready-made music distributions, but none suited me, which is why I opted for a custom one.
I always used xfce and I loved it. This is definitely a contender, and it might be good for the machine anyway, it’s just a 2nd gen i5, 12GB ram. Right now I’m just installing ubuntu-studio and see if I have some muscle memory left. (what was this swap and root partition stuff, partition tables and so on)
Speaking of Arch based: I have no experience here, but I’m confident. Besides Manjaro, do you have any experience with CachyOS, Endeavour or basic Arch?
Hello, no, I haven’t tested other Arch/Linux-based GNU/Linux distributions. CachyOS is optimized for gaming. By default, it uses KDE as its window manager. It’s nice, but it’s resource-intensive for my older machines; however, it should be possible to install lighter desktop environments (LXDE, Xfce, etc.). CachyOS tweaks Linux (the kernel) for maximum optimization for gaming, perhaps at the expense of security. It would be worth checking if this distribution offers real-time kernels for music.
On my old dell laptop (more than 10 years), i could not work with windows 11, too slow and bugs…
I tried many audio distribution, but the one which works perfect for me (like when i was using windows 7 for multi tracks recording) is librazik, a french distro based on debian.
I was surprised how reactive it is and i even tested Bitwig which works very good and i did multi tacks recording and editing with Ardour.
Librazik comes installed with many software.
Been using ubuntustudio, but version 24 was quite bad with the half-baked transition to pipewire. version 22 was pretty good. I do not think version 26 has nailed it yet.
I am tempted to give fedora jam a spin. From the live usb stuff worked way better out of the box than Ubuntu studio 24, at least for audio.
Thanks, good find! I just remembered I actually have a 3rd gen i5, but that’s already on the lower bound of the recommended hardware.
I’ll look into it. I’m actually tempted to just take a well supported lightweight distro with xfce and install the needed stuff later. But I’m so long out of the game that I first have to reenter the sphere before I try to customize it myself.