donuts

I love Evangelion. I don’t love this stupid bullshit.

Hardware wise, you’ll be hard pressed to find any even half-way popular computer that can’t run some form of Linux. So I’d say just get something that’s within your budget. Those x86 APU-based mini pcs that you can find for ~$200 are becoming pretty popular for projects these days. Something like a Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi or whatever might also be fine depending on what you want to do with it, just keep your power expectations in check. If you want to spend more money on something with graphics hardware, I’d recommend going for AMD over NVidia, just because the drivers are built into the kernel and essentially no-hassle.

When it comes to software, especially if you’re on x86, just arbitrarily pick one of the reasonably popular distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, PopOS, or any of the other ones you’ve probably heard of. One of the first things to learn about “Linux” is that there’s a whole ecosystem of software projects behind it, and there is a lot of overlap between the software that each distro runs. Yes, there are some meaningful differences between, for example, Ubuntu and Fedora, but I think they are much less meaningful to a noobie (who is just learning the basics of Linux) or an expert (who probably knows enough to bend and customize just about any distro into whatever they want).

Small caveat #1: If you prefer to have a desktop that more closely resembles Windows (like the one of the Steam Deck’s desktop mode) you might want to pick a distro spin that uses the KDE Plasma desktop. On the other hand, if you want to play around with something that’s a bit different than what you’re used to, it might be worth checking out a distro spin that uses the Gnome desktop. I can recommend them both for different reasons, so you might want to check out some videos of them to see what you’re more into before picking. (Other desktops are available, these are just the two big ones! So there truly are a ton of options to explore here if you want to.)

Small caveat #2: At this point in time are you more interested in stability or customization? If you want a truly rock-solid Linux system that’s hard to ever break, you might want to consider one of the new “atomic” distributions like Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite (or others), though you might find some of their limitations annoying. On the other side of the spectrum, if deep customization and flexibility is what you’re looking for, then you might want to venture into the deep end with things like NixOS or ArchLinux, just keep in mind that they can be very technical and overwhelming for noobs. Personally I have been using Fedora Silverblue for a couple years now and I love the stability of it, and I can work around it’s limitations with distrobox.

Another thing to consider is just using what you already have. For example, playing around with Linux in a virtual machine, setting up a Linux-based server on one of the popular VPS services, or just plugging your Steam Deck into a dock with a keyboard and monitor attached and playing with something like distrobox (which you can probably find a guide on how to set that up for your deck).

Modartt’s Pianoteq is a nice Linux native, physically modeled piano plugin.

In my experience yabridge is fantastic. With a bit of initial setup, it’s the closest thing to a native experience that I’ve come across.

You do control it with a CLI interface, so you need to be comfortable with that.

You also need to have already installed the Windows VSTs manually using WINE or whatever, and so there’s a bit of a typical “how well does this work under wine” crapshoot and a bit of a learning curve there.

I use Joplin and really like it. I sync it between my devices using nextcloud on my home server, but it seems like there are quite a few other options for syncing.

Uh, yeah… So, basically I use an ubuntu:latest (LTS) distrobox container which has:

1. Its own $HOME, specified using the --home parameter when making a distrobox container.
2. Wine-staging
3. Yabridge
4. Bitwig Studio 5 (the Linux .deb version, installed with dpkg to the default location)
5. A whole bunch of Linux native plugins (like Modartt Pianoteq, installed wherever but then with the .so’s symlinked into my ~/.vst dirs).
6. A whole bunch of Windows plugins (like an old version of Kontakt, SampleTank, AudioModelling SWAM, MODO Drum/Bass, etc.), installing in the WINEPREFIXES that live in the distrobox container’s $HOME. (I then use yabridge inside the container to bridge them all for Linux.)
7. I think I also have Pipewire installed inside the audio production container, but I can’t remember if that’s necessary or not.

Finally, I use the distrobox-export command to export Bitwig Studio to my host system, so I can run it as you normally would, just hitting the start key and clicking on the Bitwig icon.

So it’s kind of a complicated setup initially, but from day to day it’s really easy to use. I just open Bitwig, load up whatever Linux or Windows VST (the Wine ones take a little longer to initialize that I’d like but it’s not too bad), and just make music. :)

https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_tips.md#container-save-and-restore

I think I followed this. I think you have to do it through podman/docker (whichever your distrobox is using).

It almost just worked, but again I had to fix a couple of Wine symlinks to get all of my Windows VSTs working again… (I also had to reregister some VSTs in certain cases.)

Another unrelated but useful thing to look into wrt distrobox is distrobox-assemble, especially if you have a few different distrobox containers dedicated to different tasks. I could go on and on about this stuff, lmao.

I’ve heard good things about Studio1, but I haven’t tried it myself.

Oh yeah, and speaking of Distrobox…

I also happen to have all of my audio production software (DAWs, Plugins, Wine, Yabridge, etc.) living in an Ubuntu-based distrobox container, which has the added benefit of allowing me to export save the entire container and drop it mostly painlessly* onto a different machine. It’s really cool to be able to pick up my entire music making environment and bring it with me, but it might be a bit overboard for some people. I don’t have much of a choice other than to use distrobox since I run Fedora Silverblue as my daily driver. lol

*It doesn’t work flawlessly, because I sometimes have to fix some important Wine symlinks that break when doing this.

Yeah! Don’t sleep on it! I can say without reservation that yabridge is essential for me. :)

The basic yabrigde workflow is:

1. Install wine-staging and yabridge on your distro of choice.
2. Use wine to install all of your Windows VSTs somewhere. (I prefer to use a separate WINEPREFIX for each plugin maker, but that’s probably not fully necessary). If you don’t know much about Wine this can be a bit hard to wrap your mind around, but that’s another story.
3. Then you run yabridgectl add where all of your various Windows VST dll files are (instead of whatever Wine prefix you installed them in).
4. And then when you run yabridgectl sync yabridge will create a .so bridge library for each of your Windows VSTs and spit them out into ~/.vst3 or whatever.
5. Finally you point your DAW of choice to ~/.vst3 or whatever, and your WIndows VSTs should hopefully show up and work just like they do on Windows (with the usual caveat of Wine being pretty great but not always perfect).

Sadly there’s no good GUI frontend for it (that I know of at least), but as far as CLI tools it’s pretty easy to learn and use. Also, you may want to make sure that you’ve got realtime privilages setup on your system, and you can find guides to doing that in the yabridge wiki.

But yeah, I’ve got a bunch of Windows VSTs from Native Instruments and IK Multimedia and a bunch of others too, and they are work very well when bridged these days, so I’m able to use Linux for music without sacrificing anything.

I do gaming and music production on Linux without much issue at all these days.

Most games are pretty easy to work with these days thanks to Steam, Lutris, and Bottles.

As for audio, there are 4 key ingredients to my setup: Pipewire, Bitwig Studio, Wine and Yabridge.

Pipewire is pretty easy to use and works in a low latency setting just fine, so imo you no longer have to juggle PulseAudio + JACK.

Bitwig isn’t open source, but it’s fantastic and inspiring and supports Linux natively. They’ve also been great about stuff like the new open source CLAP plugin format.

I’ve found that Wine (staging) does a pretty reasonable job handling any Windows VST I’ve thrown at it, but it’s a bit of work getting it setup, especially if you’re new to the concept.

And finally yabridge is a great CLI tool for turning all of your Windows plugin .dlls into Linux .so, that you can easily use in your DAW of choice.

So if you want to do music production on Linux then definitely check out Bitwig and Reaper (along with Ardour, like you mentioned). And personally, I think that if you have a decent chunk of Windows VSTs it’s worth investing a bit of time learning how to getting them working in Wine and then bridged with yabridge.

deleted by creator

Using copyrighted material for research is fair use. Any model produced by such research is not itself a derivative work of the training material.

You’re conflating AI research and the AI business. Training an AI is not “research” in a general sense, especially in the context of an AI that can be used to create assets for commercial applications.

All I want to know is if they are going to pillage people’s private data and steal their creative IP or not.

Ethical AI starts and ends with open, transparent, legitimate and ethically sourced training data sets.

deleted by creator

Pipewire seems to do everything better than PulseAudio, in my experience. It’s stable, compatible with PulseAudio and JACK stuff, works for low latency stuff like music production, can be routed flexibly, etc… As someone who used to run a PulseAudio+JACK stack but has since replaced both with just PipeWire, I’m a big fan.

I think you’re missing my point. I’m not saying WSL is a con, I’m saying that the reason Microsoft ships a Linux subsystem is that there are useful programs and things that can be done with Linux.

Kind of hard to believe people still say stuff like this…

There is plenty of stuff that Linux does much better than Windows, for example containerized service and applications, which is why Windows needs a Linux subsystem at all. It’s possible that the main reason you think Linux is bad is that you aren’t as familiar with it.

The biggest downside to Linux remains official hardware and software support, though that’s a business economics issue and not a technical limitation.

I honestly could not imagine a circumstance in which I go back to using Windows or switch over to Mac, because Linux does basically everything I want and then some.

It’s an immutable distro akin to Fedora Silverblue, which means it’s theoretically extremely solid but you can’t easily change the base system.

And while I haven’t tried it myself, the thing that seems to set VanillaOS apart from something like Silverblue is that is built around the idea of containing various subsystems based on other distros (like an Ubuntu subsystem and an Arch subsystem), which should make it easy to install packages from a variety of distro (or even the AUR, for another example) on top of a very solid, static base system. Under the hood it uses a container management tool called Distrobox to achieve that, but it seems to be pretty nicely abstracted for user simplicity.

I daily drive Fedora Silverblue and I do something similar with distrobox for things that don’t make sense to install as Flatpaks. In other words, on my system I have an immutable base system (with optional package layering, rollbacks, rebasing, etc.), then flatpaks or appimages for most simple applications (firefox, blender, krita, etc.), and finally distrobox to handle various dev environments and music production environment (which relies on wine and a lot of plugins).

VanillaOS is something like that, but out of the box, and aiming to be GUI-user friendly.

At any rate, if you train your NN using appropriately licensed or public domain data, more power to you. But if you feed a machine a bunch of other people’s writing, artwork, music, etc., please understand that you will never truly own the output.

I am.

It is only the profit maximizing hyper capitalists who intend to use AI to exploit workers and rip off artists. I have no problem with the technology behind AI, I just don’t think people should be using it as a tool for continual, industrialized mass exploitation of the little people (like you and me) who actually own the data that they put online.

I was wrong to use the dismissive term “AI bots”. I’m genuinely sorry about that and I let my feelings as an artist get the best of me, but other than that my point still stands. To be fair, “you’re wrong” and “shut up” aren’t exactly the strongest counter arguments either. No hard feelings.

The objective truth is that “AI” neural networks synthesize an output based on an input dataset. There is no creativity, personality artistry or other x-factor there, and until there is real “general artificial intelligence” there never will be. Human beings feed inputs into the machine, and they generate an output based on some subset of those inputs. If those inputs are “fair use” or otherwise licensed, then that’s perfectly fine. But if those inputs are unlicensed copyrighted works, then you would be insane to believe that you own the output that the algorithm produces–that’s like thinking you own the music that comes out of your speakers because you hit the play button. Just because you’re in control of the playback does not mean that you created the music, and nobody would seriously think that.

I’ve worked as an artist and a programmer, and a simple analogy is the concept of a software license. Just because you can see or download some source code on GitLab does not mean that you own it or can use it freely for any purpose; most code repositories are open sourced under some kind of license, which legitimate users of that code must comply with. We’ve already seen Microsoft make this mistake and then instantly backtrack with Github Copilot, because they understand that they simply do not have the IP rights to use GPL code (for one example) to train their AI. Similarly, if a musician samples a portion of a song to use in their own song, depending on various factors they may have to share credit with the original creator, and sometimes that make sense, in my opinion.

No matter how you or I feel about it, copyright law has always been there with the basic intent to protect people who create unique works. There are some circumstances which are currently considered “fair use” of unlicensed copyrighted works (for example, for educational purposes), and I think that’s great. But I think there is zero argument that unlimited automated content generation via AI ought to be considered genuine fair use. No matter how much AI fans want to try to personify the technology, it is not engaging in a creative or artistic process, it is merely synthesizing an output based on mixed inputs, just like how an AI chat bot is not truly thinking but merely stringing words together.