This PC is basically my life, I use it for work (freelance business), entertainment, and to self host a server so I’m hesitant. I have a handful of questions for now while I look into it more:

  1. I’d prefer not to dual boo, but it might be the safest way to start? If I dual boot, get used to Linux and (hopefully) get everything I need working, can I then go from dual boot to erasing the Windows partition and recombining so I then only have Linux installed and can keep the work and programs I already installed on Linux?

  2. I do voiceover work, music production, and digital art/photography. Anyone else here do all this and what programs would you recommened to replace Audition, Photoshop, and Cubase?

–2.1. Regarding music production, has anyone successfully used vst files from Windows on Linux?

  1. The drives for my server are NTFS. Does anyone have experience with this format on Linux (I use Emby)?

  2. My bread and butter right now is voice acting so I NEED everything to play nice. I’ve read there might be some issues with drivers for my hardware, namely Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 and Behringer UV1. Anyone have any experience with this?

EDIT: Wow that’s a lot of responses. I’d like to respond to each but I’m a bit overwhelmed with all the info haha. I think I’m gonna grab an old external USB drive and live boot from there and test things out. Thanks to everyone, I’ve got a tonne to mull over now. Appreciate it!

  • mvirts@lemmy.world
    1·
    16 hours ago

    I can confirm focusrite scarlet interfaces work fine, and the uv1 should be fine as well but I don’t have one. You may need to get familiar with the Linux audio landscape. VSTs mostly work these days, although I only use foss VSTs so maybe commercial ones have their own caveats.

    For pro audio you should be using JACK to connect your sound devices. These days if you run a system that uses pipewire, pipewire can pretend to be a JACK server just fine. I like to use QJackCtl to set up Jack environments, although its not necessary because many DAWs are capable of setting up in the application.

    For a DAW I used to love Ardour, now I still like it but am sad that it has been crashing often for me. I don’t use any of them but there are some well liked Linux daws like reaper.

    You may have trouble with recording without a preemptable (aka real-time) kernel. Afaict this only matters on lower end computers or when you have a lot of live plugins running, but using a kernel with this feature just means that more kernel code can be interrupted to handle things like fresh audio data arriving over USB.

    Mostly, you’ll need some time to get everything working how you want. I agree with the recommendation to use a separate disk in your existing computer for Linux, or get a whole separate computer. The nice thing about using a separate disk is you can know for sure your windows setup is available if needed. For me I slowly left windows behind, only realizing later that it has been a year or more since I last fired it up.