Hello everyone, I need help choosing my first distro. I want to be able to run Audio software for editing and mixing. So I need also VST plug ins and others. Currently I use Windows 10, and Reaper.
I have worked with macOS and Chrome OS in the past so the desktop and Linux is not something I can’t get used to.
I also need to run Plex and Torrenting software.
I’m a computing engineer, so I can troubleshoot most issues, but I’d like to be able to fix most things. Someone recommended me Lubuntu.
Mostly, I’d like to hear your opinions. Thanks.
First off, I want to make it clear that the distro doesn’t really matter. Different distros are just what it comes pre-packed with by default.
TLDR:
-
For something easy to use: Linux Mint
-
For something that has pre-installed audio software (but maybe not the ones you want): Ubuntu Studio
-
If you want to build your system from scratch: Debian (or Arch if you want the latest and greatest software, and don’t mind the occasional update breaking your system around once a year or so, and needing to spend an hour fixing it)
-
Regardless of which distro you get, use JACK or PipeWire for your sound server. PulseAudio (on its own) has too much latency.
More details:
I first tried Ubuntu Studio. It comes with a lot of software related to audio production. But I found it to be insanely slow, and it didn’t even come with Reaper anyway.
I tried OpenSUSE because I liked that it had the option to manually deselect the software you don’t want (and I was too much of a beginner to know how to pick my packages from the ground-up). It worked well.
Eventually I moved to Debian. I didn’t want any of the extra fluff and found it was pretty easy to choose everything myself. One thing that’s important is that you don’t want to use PulseAudio. Either use JACK (which I think needs to be used in conjunction with PulseAudio actually) or use PipeWire, which is what I use.
For any Windows software, use Bottles to emulate them on Linux. I actually ended up needing to go back to windows because of one audio software: Wwise. There was no way of running it in Linux. A VM probably would’ve worked, but that would’ve been a massive hassle for how I’d need to use it.
Free Linux VSTs: https://vital.audio/ https://lsp-plug.in/ https://github.com/TukanStudios/TUKAN_STUDIOS_PLUGINS
Paid Linux VSTs: https://www.acmt.co.uk/products/index.html https://librewave.com/ https://www.audiodamage.com/collections
As an aside, distro doesn’t matter but should make sure realtime is set up properly for the optimal latency. That usually requires the linux-rt kernel. The default one isn’t quite as bad as it used to be, but linux-rt will be able to guarantee low latency processing without dropouts. Also worth tuning/hardcoding latencies in JACK or PipeWire if the audio delay is too big out of the box.
Those Tukan plugins are not VSTs, they are reaper specific plugins.
I have no idea about Bottles but most people use yabridge these days which is really easy to use and works very well.
Thank you for your input and experience. I’ll go with Debian then. With that I’ll have a project that seems to be fun. How is the latency on Linux?
-
Check out ubuntu studio. It comes preloaded with a ton of software which can help expose you to plenty of options to find what you like.
Even if you end up going with a different distro, id recommend booting it up and playing with it for a while to explore.
I don’t think an audio distro is needed nowadays. I use endevour os, with a zen kernel or real time one (trivial to set up, just install one package) and used this tool to fine tune the setup https://codeberg.org/rtcqs/rtcqs Then it’s pipewire, reaper, yabridge and not much else.
I’d suggets Void. It has Ardour in the repo (not Reaper though) and PiperWire with JACK should work out of the box. If you want Reaper, you’d have to install it manually though. I’m working on a template for Reaper, but it’s not finished yet. If you’re willing to wait a month or so, you’ll probably have Reaper in xbps-src as well.
Last time I looked there were not enough plugins available for it to be good for a beginner wanting to use it for audio.
Plugins as in VSTs?
Yes. LV2 and VST3
AV Linux is pretty damn good.
I would say Arch because the AUR is amazing and Arch all around is so good but you’ll need to be making a lot of decisions during install that you know nothing about. If you want to learn then I think it’s the best overall.
