Linux / FOSS Tomfoolery

Community Projects
21

Not extensively, but something tells me that it probably works just fine across the board, sort of like Audacity, GIMP, or something like that. I’ve noticed that the FOSS / nearly-FOSS stuff tends to be the most solid, and anything geared toward Windows / Mac users that’s later ported to Linux sort of remains an afterthought in terms of bug fixes and updates, or in some cases, maybe it’s a little more difficult to find the one package manager that supplies the current version and everyone else is lagging, etc.

I might’ve spoke too soon about FL Studio, though; I had seen Bottles being mentioned in place of Wine a few times but disregarded it (because I thought Bottles was just a Wine frontend anyway?) but as it turns out, the surface functionality under Bottles is definitely there. I haven’t extensively used it yet, but being able to open patcher and nest a VFX Script in there looks pretty promising so far. Apparently if you spend time tweaking bottles frameworks and dependencies you can even have the shitty inbuilt AI back, but I’d gladly pass on that feature anyway :sweat_smile:.

Might just be my resistance to change / growing pains, really. Sometimes the solution is to just try another app or cut your losses, but not really having access to VSTs just feels so bland. I really wish I could somehow get Voltage Modular to run, if nothing else, but due to its strict DRM, that’s unlikely to ever happen unless they actually come up with a Linux build. Maybe one day.

I’m still committed to this, though. I came really close to reinstalling Windows, but I took a few deep breaths. Having a decluttered workspace with mostly free tools and millions of ways of stringing them together is still a win. I just need to toughen up a little :laughing:.

I also ended up dual-booting with Zorin just for a laugh, but they weirdly have all sorts of audio tools like Pipewire managers and shit just right on tap in the software manager. I know nothing about the Carla plugin system, and this might actually integrate with Bitwig in some way, so I think there are probably more alternatives / solutions than problems. It’s just a matter of finding the better option and loading things up that way, but there’s no roadmap in sight. lol

1 Like
22

I can vouch that Audacity, Pd and Supercollider work great on whatever hellscape of Linux crap I have installed, but that’s the end of any real experience. I have Reaper on there as a trial and have used it a few times, but honestly I haven’t put in a lot of time doing serious audio workflow with any of it, it’s mostly just a playground for learning stuff.

I’m still on Win10 and unless there’s some ridiculously compelling reason I doubt I’ll upgrade. 10 is bought and paid for, pretty locked down on my network, and only used for audio and the occasional coding project. I’d love for it to be my last round of Windows. At the same time, it’s functional enough, has the tools I use, and I’m not interacting with or supporting Microsoft in any way by using it at this point. At least that’s my mealymouthed justification to myself.

100%. It’s death by 1000 cuts every time I’m at a Windows desktop. The workflow is so clunky, the views are not what I want, nothing runs as quickly as it should and there’s zero customization compared to Linux. Everything works, nothing crashes, but it all takes twice as long as it should and I hate it.

1 Like
23

Well, I’m tapping out. The best way I can sum up why I’m tapping out (some of this is overkill / redundant tinkering BS, but most isn’t):

Screenshot 2026-02-24 151245

*

(also, a lot of the shit I use is just broken / needs to be debugged in order to run under LInux, as mentioned above a few times)

I consider this experiment to be a win, and I’m going to absolutely keep using CLI tools and doing cool batch processing under WSL and on some of my hardware that can’t handle W11. I think, until Linux gets more popular / supported by more devs and bugs get ironed out (mostly on the UI-end, of course), Windows is just crushing the competition like always. I talk a lot of shit, but in the end, I can have Ubuntu under the hood, package managers, and all sorts of cool shit under Windoze. Everything ‘just works’, and I don’t have to fight every step of the way to get something up and running. I’ve learned a lot of valuable lessons through this experiment.

This is the real dream. If VM and other software didn’t have to phone home all the time, I’d probably try this, too. Unfortunately I’m probably going to have to roll with whatever the new thing is until I can’t afford to anymore, then fall back on Ubuntu or something out of necessity rather than out of morbid curiosity. For that, I’m actually really glad it’s there at all.

1 Like
24

Maybe someday soon we’ll see the integration. Since our last chat, I went ahead and tried plugdata and retried supercollider (love it this time around)…. but I’m just goofin around or trying to record some output.

PS my “laugh” emoji on your frustrated post was just that I know your pain when it comes to getting things done with Linux and how it can drive somebody mad lol

1 Like
25

That’s awesome! I still haven’t touched SC in any meaningful way yet, but if you’ve got anything cool brewing I would love to check it out! Might be just enough to get me into it for once!

I think the only real prototyping environment I’ve really tried and got comfortable with is ChucK so far - it’s weird as hell, but has some really cool stuff going on under the hood.

@Artificer had some cool SC experiments going on in the Prototype thread, too, and judging by that and the videos we were sharing, it looks really cool so far. I also hope to drop more scripts into that thread since everything seems to have a sort of web-based IDE now!

2 Likes
26

Giving it another serious, inquisitive try. I’ve actually figured out a few solid things along the way, and if I can pass this down to any future Linux audio enthusiasts, maybe I can save you the turmoil I’ve set myself up for and you can have a smoother time.

Let’s roll out a few for starters:

  • ChucK works fine when you read the docs. Oops. Using Homebrew instead of apt gets you there, with all of its dependency glory; now my code runs the same as it does in the web IDE.

  • Speaking of which, Ubuntu APT versions of programs are usually wildly outdated / missing a lot of dependencies that can be sewn together by other package managers. Some of you are very aware of this already, but I decided not to listen to people who warned me about this.

  • Sonic Pi was never made for amd64 Linux in the first place; that was my assumption. It runs on pretty much any ARM device, though, because it was designed for one. IIRC I had it running on my Le Potato and Orange Pis at one point, and I wouldn’t really be surprised if running the Windoze version in Wine worked for at least the basic functionality (nope; just gave it a try. Will try Bottles next, since it has more framework support).

  • Documentation, manpages, Github and example programs are really where it’s at, even though a lot of them are written like a drunk ramble. Just trying to understand what in the hell they’re trying to convey makes the difference, even if it takes all day. This is even more true for compilers, assemblers, CLI tools, etc.

  • AI will lead you down a clusterfuck of a rabbit hole with this stuff and should be avoided. Outside of simple commands like adding shit to PATH when you’ve forgotten for the millionth time, it’ll often have you building from source and taking a longer route around the aforementioned ‘brew install whateverthefuck’. It’s 100% the wrong answer, 100% of the time, like saving a minute on your way home from work yet having to pay a hefty toll for it. AI has no concept of the ever-shifting build chains of developers, so it’s no wonder why it’s garbage.

  • People who say shit works ‘just fine’ in wine and bottles when your reality doesn’t line up aren’t using legitimate versions (I don’t know this, but I know this); DRM and lockouts are the hurdle. If you’re using shady versions, you’ll probably have a great time. This is just one more reason for me to never spend another dollar on something that’s purposely designed to hurt the people who supported the project; I’d much rather just find FOSS alternatives and have to read a little more. At least I can install it on more than a few setups if I want, or do whatever the fuck I want with it.

  • Zorin is pretty bitchin’ if you’re coming over from Windows. Even though it’s just a reskinned Ubuntu, the way the windows function and every little GUI quirk is replicated is a really nice touch for when you’re not using the terminal and want things to work like you’re used to. I’m genuinely considering supporting the project even though you don’t really get anything cool in return.

  • Things really do fuck up constantly (bluetooth, WIFI, pretty much everything you can think of), but you just have to consider the tradeoff. With everything being free and having the ability to create really cool toolchains and automate pretty much anything you want, there are going to be some drawbacks. Contrary to my original thoughts on the matter, I think it’s well-worth it, but I totally understand why most people wouldn’t want to try any of this.

TL;DR: It ain’t over yet. I’m just getting started :sweat_smile:

1 Like
27

By design, for better or worse. Ubuntu is the MS/Apple of Linux now and they’re trying to serve a ridiculously wide array of users. Their main repos are really “do no harm” over something like Arch’s bleeding edge (totally awesome for programs, terrifying for the OS itself). A lot of times apt isn’t grabbing dependencies because there are flags for potential conflicts or incompatibilities. Because apt works at the system level it can overwrite lib files or programs that other programs or the OS rely on - so now ChucK works but Firefox or Wayland is busted, etc.

Homebrew works at the user level by design because it was initially built for MacOS where there isn’t the equivalent system space/kernel access analog to root, so everything has to be done per user. This has the upside of not fucking with crucial system files at the expense of a shit load of disk space if you homebrew everything because it’ll grab a full copy of every dependency for each thing it installs. It’s basically Flatpak without being monolithic. Homebrew’s manifest also tends to get updated a lot more often because it doesn’t have the testing and review that mainstream Linux repos get. There are also some pretty big security implications to homebrew on Linux, but lots of people use it without much problem and if it works it works.

qemu will emulate arm64 with qemu-system-aarch64, specifically both the Pi4 and OrangePi boards. Maybe worth looking into.

I have two Linux laptops and they both work absolutely fine…right up until they don’t. Hardware compatibly, especially for laptops, is a hot fucking mess. Wifi occasionally drops - sometimes I can restart the nmcli service, sometimes I have to restart the whole damn computer. Mouse pointer will freeze for no good reason and then sometimes start working again when I swap windows. Sleep works like a champ 99% of the time until it decides not to restore itself and I have to power cycle. Hibernate is basically a no-go because of Microsoft imposed Window-specific CPU power state settings. I agree it’s worth it, I also agree that not everyone wants to deal with this shit.

What I think a lot of people miss (and by people I really mean all the braindead youtube Linux ‘influencers’ and their AI-slop article ilk) is that every year MS and Apple spend more than the total investment over all of Linux just in working with/influencing hardware manufacturers, working with specification groups, and paying programmers to write and update drivers for third party hardware for their OS. If you have a device that isn’t some weird thing from the ass-end of China, there’s a 99.9% chance it works out of the box and just keeps working. I’d give Linux a 50-90% chance depending on the prevalence and “importance” of the hardware and whether there happens to be some 19 year old Swede who’s just really into making obscure USB cameras work.

That’s really the key thing here - software companies aren’t going to develop for Linux until there’s a bedrock offering underneath where they’re not having to play guessing games with their code and users can trust that Linux has solid functionality (ie wifi) on whatever PC they throw it on. And that only happens with a major time and money investment between hardware and the OS itself.

2 Likes
28

With all of this in mind, it really does feel like a miracle in a way. I’m using a really weird chinese desktop and TBH, if the wifi or bluetooth fuck up every once in a while, that’s really good, considering how things used to be. Using any old wifi USB adapter tends to work when the internal has really shitty bugs, so I’m thinking the swedes really know their external devices. God bless them :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Also, my audio interface has been flawless on every run, and I had no indication it should’ve even worked at all under Linux. Some of us forget to keep track of all the good things that have been going on behind the scenes, but I’m realizing my biases as I go - or at least some of them :slight_smile:

ChucK seemingly had a lot of the more-obscure dependencies for audio pipelining, so it makes sense that this was the preferred method; about a month ago when I patched the holes with shitty AI, it pretty much had me compiling a lot of that stuff from source. It worked, interface-wise, but still wouldn’t treat my arrays like anything more than singular Osc objects after patching all the holes. I definitely wouldn’t go for Homebrew unless it’s recommended, but in cases like these where it is, I’m so glad I read the docs!

Also, contrary to whatever it had me doing, having the original IDE was a lot less-important than simply being able to write code that worked and run it in the CLI. Priorities go out the window when you outsource your brain, I guess. That was my fault.

I had heard of this in the past, but never gave it a shot. Is this pretty reliable for the most part? I’m more willing to exhaust paths like this, so it’s kind of fun to give things a spin and test how far you can go with them. It would be awesome to get it up and running, but technically I guess I can also just livecode with ChucK, so it’s not a huge loss either way. I’m really not sure why the dev just neglected x64 Linux and jumped straight to Windows for something that was developed for the RasPi, but I guess that’s just how projects like these are sometimes.

Also, is this mostly translating between arm / x64 ASM? I’ve always wondered how these things worked under the hood. I could imagine something like that having a pretty high success rate.

29

I think the reason most things “just work” these days is standards - very few people are designing custom hardware that don’t conform to some sort of published set of rules which can be leveraged by driver programmers. Like USB is a style of plug and some wires - I can totally write a bespoke driver that sends and reads data any way I want, but why? USB standard is a thing and as long as I keep to it, things will probably just work. The reason your Focusrite works well is because it’s Class Compliant and that’s and old-ass, well documented system that everybody got right ages ago.

Where it get hairy is a modular system like Linux where the classic xkcd Standards gag is the rule. There’s lots of implementations of the same thing, dependent on all the other mishmash of competing implementations and vetted/tested by no one. Then you combine that with whoever, say Dell’s, specific hardware/uefi implementation of this well-documented wifi unit, and they really only mentioned the couple of changes to Microsoft because are they really going to send out 500 emails to every Linux distro, so said distros do the best they can and cover 90% of the functionality except the edge case when wifi drops for a second AND the ssd is writing AND there’s keyboard input AND…whatever. Something breaks because whoever wrote it was doing the best they can with the information they had and now I’m restarting my computer. Mostly works, probably not the end of the world when it doesn’t.

I’ve only used it to emulate a RaspPi once, and it worked. That’s a pretty small sample size, but my guess is it’ll work but the question will be how well it interops with everything else on the host system - audio, file paths, etc.

That said, in general I wouldn’t be exaggerating to say you have literally never used more battle-tested software than qemu. The kvm/qemu stack literally built the internet that we know, way back in the mid-2000s when virtualization first came to the forefront before Docker, VMWare and K8 became a thing. Every. Single. Website. ran on kvm/qemu. It’s what Proxmox and Libvirt and Virtualbox and pretty much any Linux VM runs at its core. It’s fucking tough as nails.

That’s exactly what qemu is doing. It’s a low-level translation unit between platforms. It’s real job is to emulate hardware. Think of it like a Gameboy emulator but for real computer hardware - you give it an x86 instruction and it has mappings to the same/equivalent instruction for a bunch of other hardware.

Where this gets interesting and cool is when you pair it with kvm (kernel virtual machine). That’s baked into the Linux kernel (so the same across distros) and it knows about and talks to your hardware directly through the kernel. That means it’s really fucking fast as it has near-native access to the cpu and ram. kvm and qemu and tightly integrated. So in your Pi VM, ChucK sends a multiplication command that relies on an ARM4 MUL (unsigned multiply), qemu picks it up, knows that it’s actually running on x64, figures out what the x64 MUL equivalent is. Then it hollers at kvm, passes that x64 MUL which kvm runs directly on the cpu, hands back to qemu which gives it to ChucK via the OS. All that is way faster than trying to emulate the ARM cpu (ie type-2 hypervisor).

You don’t have to deep dive into the inner workings, but it’s a seriously cool system that’s worth learning about because it’s interesting. It’s also FOSS and readily available on any Linux distro so might as well know about it and levergae it.

1 Like
30

Even though everything doesn’t need a deep-dive, I’m sort of in it for a touch of that, too. Above all, this has been an extremely educational experience so far and I don’t think I’m ever going back to a non-Linux system. Just for the fact that everything is open, pretty transparent and easy to get up and running (even if configurations are in order) gives it a sort of character that feels lacking when you’re using a lot of fancy GUI shit and have no idea as to what’s happening underneath. Not to mention, paying yearly for your new DAW upgrades and bug fixes, etc.

To be fair though (cue the ‘this is a music forum?’ meme from a few months ago), I haven’t really been making music for a good long while now, so I still have no idea what my real workflow would end up looking like if I ever get back into it, but it would probably just be a bunch of bash scripts and whatever weird tools I could find, plus a touch of Reaper for arranging and Renoise for resampling. Maybe there will come a day for that stuff, as was the original idea when I made this thread, but now it has gone a bit off-course, as things do.

Now to find that thread where we were discussing the pitfalls of malloc :joy:

1 Like
31

I think my takeaway about Linux-based music is that if you want to do it, you totally can without a problem. If you want to make music like you do on Mac or Windows, you’re completely fucked and that’s unlikely to change in the near term.

Maybe that’s an advantage? Walk back into it with a fresh set of eyes and expectations and make music based on what’s available instead of what you’re used to. I think there’s also very much a space for software development adjacent to audio - all the tooling and plugins and dsp and whatnot that people use. Like in the EDM space, Steve Duda probably has more name recognition than 99% of actual artists and to my knowledge doesn’t actually publish his own music. There’s a place for people that want to develop the tools and stuff that musicians use.

Hell yeah I'm gonna bitch and ramble

I think there’s a question about where all this fits into the larger landscape of AI and platform enshitifcation and the macroeconomics of personal computing. More and more if you just want to “use a computer” you’re talking about webapps ( web browser, email, office shit, etc) that will run on anything. The experience isn’t really different between OS’s by design and you can do it just fine on your phone or potato PC. And that’s really good because who the fuck can afford to build a PC these days given the post-AI price of hardware?

The price of everything you touch is up. Tech stuff is way up. Are we moving into a post-personal computing world where only the affluent (or very resourceful) get to play with real tech? I think AI zealots would say all this is as intended because in The Future™ all the expensive hardware will be in a data center and you’ll just ask Alexa or your phone to do things as an interface, but even if that’s true we’re in a gap where it doesn’t work like that but the pricing suggests it should.

The entire FOSS ideal presupposes that the 18 year old Swede can get his hands on a PC to learn to program and can afford to buy weird USB cameras. That’s been a foregone conclusion for the last 25 years, but I’m worried we’re increasingly living in a world where it’s not the case. It’s easy to look at the past and say “FOSS will always exist as an alternative to big, greedy tech” but the future is maybe that there isn’t a FOSS because there aren’t enough people that think like that who can afford the hardware to provide an alternative. That’s a doomer worst case view, but if the last decade has shown me anything, it’s not completely unrealistic.

As for audio, maybe FL’s online package is what music production looks like, at least for the bedroom producer - you don’t need some bespoke system, you just need something that runs a browser. I have my doubts that it’ll be wonderful, but it’ll be something for the poors to play with. The Hans Zimmers of the world ain’t using FL Studio Online to wrangle 250 orchestral tracks, but that group wasn’t using Cakewalk in the '00s either, they were using ProTools on $5000+ hardware. I could totally see this coming full circle. I think ‘real’ audio workstations will always exist because there’s a high-end market for them, but the days of being able to replicate that on whatever computing device you have at home may be numbered.

1 Like
32

I hate to sound too optimistic and naive about this one (although the latter is very true), but I think it’s going to be a case of ‘pry it out of my cold, dead hands’.

I definitely think the world will move on and learn to not give a shit about any of this stuff ever again, but people like me (and I’m going to definitely assume you, as well) are going to be the cool dinosaurs of tech, keeping old systems alive with spare parts, using that old version of whatever OS runs perfectly on it and just continuing doing what we love.

Obviously, the rest of the world will move on and never know about how cool it was to do the deep-diving and dicking around with systems and programs, and the corporate side will just become browser-based BS as well (hopefully with AI that actually works?), but I think we’re at least going to have multiple snapshots preserved where we can jump back in, download Supercollider and other tools, and find our zen.

People keep all kinds of old systems alive, and plus, non-tech-savvy people are still dumping their old computers when Windoze decides they need to upgrade. I’m pretty sure I could have a shitload of fun with an x86 system thanks to all of the crazy shit that’s available (multiplied by small quantities of knowledge gained over time), so I think it would take something far more catastrophic for this to just vanish one day. Hobbyists are going to keep it afloat in some form or another, and embracing the jank of it all might actually make it sort of… fun?

33

Also, I can’t believe another week has passed, Pretty sure I’ve had absolutely zero hiccups in the past 8 days, and I really couldn’t tell you why. I’m still just dual-wielding Zorin and Ubuntu (gravitating more toward Ubuntu for the compatibility and Zorin to pretend like I’m still using Windows), and they both seem to be running better than ever before. Maybe it was just some dangling updates, broken packages or something; I have absolutely no idea, but this is running like a dream.

Plus, the latest Bitwig update seems way more solid. I had no idea they were going to do that :star_struck:

I keep finding great tools lying around, and I’m going to have to do a deeper scavenger hunt in the audio realm to see what’s there. I still haven’t quite figured out what types of plugins exist here, either, but I think some of the formats (like CLAP, iirc?) are supposed to run native. Weirdly, just having Renoise, Bitwig and Reaper (not to mention the other ones mentioned) feels like a dream as it is, since I’ve lowered my expectations and realized that I don’t need a shitload of plugins in the first place. Better focus, really.

34

100%, I’m in the exact same boat. From fixing cars with my dad as a kid to coming up in the rabidly DIY hardcore/metal community in the 80s/90s to working in tech, a huge part of ‘who I am’ is tied up in learning and tinkering and building. It’s going to be a thing I do regardless of the barriers because sitting around watching Netflix and playing video games feels like waiting around to die. And I think we’re safe-ish, for now. My worry isn’t for you and me, it’s for future generations. I don’t think Linux disappears overnight, but as prices rise and people become more reliant on whatever an AI model spits out for an answer I worry we may end up with a world where the opportunities and initial conditions that created people like us just dry up.

Right now you can walk into any Goodwill in the US and find a computer that’ll turn on and…compute. Probably not well, probably not enough to play a AAA game, but enough to learn about how computers work. But that piece of shit is at least 200% more expensive than it was 6-7 years ago due to general and tech-specific inflation. There’s some segment of the population that falls off being able or interested because of that price change, and some of those people would have gone on to do things with technology that could have great ramifications. What I’m worried about is that at a large and accelerating scale. I doubt I’ll live to see it completely fall apart, but it feels like one possible future.

That’s great! Sounds like you are over the hump on the big problems and hitting a steady state.

My guess is it’s the old joke -
“Doctor, it hurts when I do this…”
“Then don’t do that” :laughing:

I’ve heard good things about Zorin but never used it. Ubuntu is always a solid option, there’s just so much use and development behind it. Distros always make me think of the ultimate Linux rabbit hole, the modularity of everything. It’s totally unnecessary but incredibly illuminating to do something like rip out or start without X11 and move to Wayland, swapping or adding desktop env, playing with alternative repos, and even building programs from source.

Obviously none of that is necessary and I love that there are good ‘out of the box’ solutions now, but for us nerdy types it exposes the full power of Linux in that you can exactly tailor your system to your needs, and you know how it works under the hood to an extent. I’m not suggesting Gentoo or LFS, but taking Ubuntu and switching from Gnome to KDE is an interesting challenge. Or Debian server and bootstrapping up to a working desktop. Stuff like that teaches you so much about how things are structured and how to troubleshoot Linux.

Of course if your goal is to actually use Linux to do something, none of that is probably a good idea lol

1 Like
35

Good to see that this thread ist still going. Sending good vibes to everyone here.

I’m so bored by linux that hardware is my new linux to conquer.

PXL_20260320_160955253
PXL_20260320_1609552531920×1080 576 KB

1 Like