Comment by i80and 2 days ago
I'm a pretty prolific gamer, but at the start of the year I finally kicked Windows to the curb.
It's been fine. Surprisingly few games I'm interested in to begin with have anticheat that doesn't work on Linux, and it's comforting to know games aren't allowed to just shove trash into kernel space at will.
Yep same; have had Linux on my laptop for a decade plus, but finally switched my desktop over a few years ago, and I have no regrets. The real magic is that I no longer feel the need to do any research before buying a game; it usually just works. Granted, I don't really play competitive multiplayer games, so YMMV (but even that might be about to change if the Steam Machine sells well enough).
The thing is I still need Windows for music production.
Linux will never compete here.
They said this about gaming too... all it takes is Valve-esque sponsor
Until Valve starts shipping native SteamOS games, they were and are right.
Games are developed on Windows, using Windows APIs and development tools, and then Valve does the job studios don't see any value in spending development resources on, even though some of them use engines that also target GNU/Linux.
Talking about Linux gaming with Proton is no different than if Windows users would start talking about Windows being their favourite Linux distribution due to WSL 2.0.
It takes a stable ABI and a single target for apps. Don’t expect music production to ever show up for gnu/linux. Maybe Android
Bitwig is available for Linux, but I don't know what the limitations are.
The sad thing is linux, like MacOS, is often vastly superior for audio routing and latency.
Personally I gave up all my audio productions tools that don't support Linux, but since music/audio work is just a hobby for me that's easier to do. I do miss my old DAWs (Ableton/Reason), and I miss a lot of VST plugins.
Not everyone can just re-base their setup on linux (for me Renoise & VCV Rack), but I can get plenty of joy out of a complete lack of Windows, license management crapware, invasive rootkit level DRM, etc.
Side benefit: it pushes me to get some more external hardware, but I have to do investigations on how some companies do firmware updates which often require MacOS/Windows or Chrome Browser (fucking webmidi looking at you Novation)
I've tried switching to hardware sequencers multiple times.
I just don't like it. I came of age making beats in Fruity Loops. I'll gladly drop another 200$ or 300$ just to make things easier.
I do have some dreams of making an open source sequencer that runs directly off a raspberry pi. Something like a fully open source MPC.
Some projects like this exist, but it's still more difficult than I'd like.
Maybe one day in the distant future Apple will make affordable laptops. A MacBook that takes a standard 2280 SSD would be amazing.
Never going to happen though. That's where the money is.
> I came of age making beats in Fruity Loops
Fruity Loops 4 was my first DAW, and yeah it has been hard to ever leave computer based production behind since then.
The only hardware sequencing that has ever clicked for me is the Polyend Tracker, which is just a tracker so I hesitate to even call it hardware sequencing. I also dig Elektron's sequencing, but its an entirely different headspace I have to spend time in to get used to everytime I fire one up.
I'm lucky that most of my projects only use 4-12 channels of midi/audio, because I can't stand massive projects with 40+ channels of things going on like some friends I've worked with. Hard to imagine trying to do that in hardware alone.
I dropped my Game Pass sub immediately after they upped the sub price and unplugged my Xbox Series X. I have a Bazzite machine, but I've had issues with the NVidia drivers and not enough patience to deal with it. So i'm currently ONLY using my Steam Deck OLED for gaming. When i want to play big AAA games at my desk (SD in docked mode), i'll use GeForce Now and all of it has been a wonderful experience, even the online "competitive" FPS games like BF6. Much better than my experience on either Windows or Xbox. I'll never go back... and i'm impatiently waiting on my Steam Machine!