Toidi

I’ve been running Pipewire in pro audio setup for my son and his band mates since the early days of the project. Granted I did run into some issues at first, but for a long time now it has been solid as a rock. With all of the plugins it is a joy to work with, no more Jack, Jack 2, Alsa, Pulse bridging and configuration nonsense, it all just ‘works’ now.

I would recommend it to anyone as a first option when setting up anything audio related on Linux now.

Last I remember Ethan was neck deep with Faudio project in WINE/Proton. Looks like all of that work may be nearing completion if he is getting back into porting.

The deck uses PDC?, basically it has a negotiated power draw. The charger is around 2-2.5Am(I can’t remember anything today), 45W and can range from 5-15 volts. I’ve had usb hubs with memory sticks/cards, keyboard, hdmi and external ssd all plugged in with zero issues, although if I use my usb-c extension cable I need to run it from the power cable to the hub and not the hub to the deck as things get very flakey configured with the second option.

Had almost the exact same experience with Ubuntu studio when setting it up for my son. Fantastically easy to install but ended up with just an overwhelming amount of ‘stuff’ there we really didn’t need.

Carla, Cadence, Audacity, Ardour, Guitarix, Hydrogen, Couple of VST synths to get you started and you have a basic studio that can be installed and ran on almost any Linux Distro.

Linux Mint with Cinnamon Desktop Environment, PoP Os with their Cosmic/gnome desktop environment, or Fedora workstation with KDE desktop environment. Pick one of those three and roll with it ;)

There are tonnes of reasons why these are good/bad choices but simply put. They are all very well documented (mint and Pop are Ubuntu based), Fedora has a very active and helpful community.

Cinnamon on mint and KDE on fedora are both very much like windows in the way they look and behave. PoP Os is a bit more Mac like with their desktop.

I personally use an Arch based distro (endeavour OS) but the three above are just much easier to sink your teeth into.

Crossover is not really for Linux gaming. Sure it can run games, but it’s mainly focused on providing a stable environment to run commercial software applications. Think of it more as a LTS version of WINE for running adobe suite etc.

Hey Liam hope you are well and the site is going good. I used to follow your stuff religiously when I was over on Reddit.

Many steam deck users report that using moonlight as a client works great with nvidia hosts. It utilises nvidia gamestream protocol which is built into the nvidia drivers on Windows/Linux, basically removing the need to mess around with encoder settings.

Most mainstream distros will work with pretty much all of the software suggestions. I tend to avoid recommending Ubuntu these days as Canonical have some stubborn ideas regarding things (snaps should have been shelved long ago in favour of flatpack), that said, PoP-Os is an excellent choice for buntu based without the snaps.

Video,editing: shotcut is pretty good alongside Kdenlive. For anyone working with audio, Audacity is a definite must have for track/sample editing and effects. Whilst Ardour is an extremely capable DAW, there are others you might want to check out, LMMS is a nice sequencer (fruity loops) DAW for example. On the professional side there is Bitwig (never used it but heard good things about it) and my personal favourite Reaper.