Deciding on Dual-Booting#
What?#
After switching to linux again a few months ago, this time intending to switch over permanently, I had the same experiencE as before, where the whole system felt snappy, fast to use, and I really enjoyed it a lot.
I did a composing jam during this time where I tested out the Bitwig Studio daw for the first time since it had a Linux native version, and Bitwig felt a lot smoother performance wise on Linux than Reaper, which at times felt a bit sluggish on the graphical side on my machine (even on Windows…).
But sadly I still encountered the same issues I’ve had before on my previous making music in Linux testing, which was that I tend to use/own too many sampled instruments whose samplers/plugins do not have native support for linux.
Since they are not natively supported, the performance through compability layers is a bit hit and miss, with some things having a lot bigger performance overhead than others, or just random audio glitches etc. which really starts to annoy me in constant usage.
But for anything else my experiences have always been great! If you read through the linked blog for the composing jam I previously did on Linux, you can see I also did some game devy stuff for that as well, in the form of a little context demo game (a modified/continued version of a someone elses MIT licensed demo though 😉).
So, since I really want to write more instrumental music using all the samples that I own + I’ve been using Cubase since I started writing music and it’s not natively supported in Linux, I decided to just choose the best of both worlds approach and dual-boot a windows installation alongside my Linux system that I will only use for music production, and everything else I will do on my SPYWARE/COPILOT FREE linux system…
Now, having just set up this aforementioned system, I already know that needing to restart/boot into windows to do any music stuff is going to be a pain in the ass, but I want to use the stuff I own and still would like to keep my privacy for other stuff, so sacrificing some convenience is a price im willing to pay.
Of course yelling about wanting privacy while still having a windows installation on a second drive on the same system with my Linux OS is a bit of a moot point, I know 😅, but with the current hardware prices I’m not going to build a separate PC for music production.. 😂
Closing words#
But at least for the foreseeable future, this is the setup I’m going to use to get best of both worlds.
If the music stuff I use ends up getting Linux support/native versions in the future, then I will actually switch my music production workflow to there as well, but for now with Steinberg not really thinking that a linux port would be profitable and all the major Sampler developers being of the same mind, spyware OS it will be for music 🥲
One hope I have is that if Windows keeps showing all this data collection/copilot stuff to their OS, it might hurt Windows usage in the professional domain of music production, leading to support for Linux as a side effect, but that might be a pipe dream, since a lot of people use seem to use MAC’s instead of Windows anyway….
I will still post some Linux stuff on here if anything interesting comes up from the audio side, but for now my Linux system is working great on my EndevourOS and KDE (with Khronkite tiling script) setup and don’t have much more to say about it for the foreseeable future.
But, keeping my fingers crossed for the future possibility of Linux support either way! 🤞