Running FOSS is practical for the long term, even beyond moral judgments. Proprietary software starts strong with lots of funding, but it only gets worse and worse as it goes along. Open source starts slower but plays the long game. You can take a look at something like Windows itself for an example of the gradual infestation of ads and user-hostile features/tracking. It's never going to get better. The only hope for proprietary users is for a new proprietary app to be created and start off more user-friendly because they need to attract users. Once they have the users they'll restart the cycle again.
this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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Linux
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That is what I am starting to realize. Every paid program that I used to desire is now subscription based.
Also, I am coming to terms with how truly powerful FOSS programs are. People seem to pay for the workflow, the user interface, more than the capabilities. At least I feel that way with DAWs. Ardour does everything. Vital makes every sound. I can be happy with that. I need to focus on making music.
The term you and @Yote are looking for is enshittification. Cory Doctrorow wrote a blog post about this.
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Okay, lots of other comments I didn’t read, and this might have been mentioned.
👏Syncthing👏
You mentioned OneDrive. I also jumped around storage solutions as I explored the FOSS world, and nothing hold a candle to Syncthing (in my opinion, but I want/need to try nextCloud). I won’t drone on about it, but if you’re looking to ditch another big data company that’s probably scraping your files, check out Syncthing
Yes, Syncthing seems like the right solution. I don't need to have files in someone elses computer, I just need certain files in all of my computers.
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.
Studio1 is now running on Linux (using Distrobox at least). Ambisonics and Binaural stuff are what I am mostly interested in, the IME Ambisonic toolkit poorly is not available as a Flatpak, otherwise Ardour would be awesome!
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.
Nice, how do you export Distroboxes? I am on Kinoite, funny seems to be quite common in the Lemmy Community.
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.
Nice! Wait you have Wine in a Distrobox making Windows VSTs work as a module for a Linux DAW? Thats crazy.
Meanwhile I would already be happy flatpakking the IEM ambisonit toolkit, to be a runtime and run with Ardour. I would love to do Ambisonic music, its such an old invention and never used, which is so weird?
Uh, yeah... So, basically I use an ubuntu:latest (LTS) distrobox container which has:
- Its own $HOME, specified using the
--homeparameter when making a distrobox container. - Wine-staging
- Yabridge
- Bitwig Studio 5 (the Linux .deb version, installed with dpkg to the default location)
- A whole bunch of Linux native plugins (like Modartt Pianoteq, installed wherever but then with the .so's symlinked into my ~/.vst dirs).
- 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.)
- 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. :)
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Welcome back. Good decision.
What you have learned about Linux is that the most important thing is FOSS/Libre computing.
Namely, that the user is no.1 and everything that the software does must always respect the freedom of the user and be to their benefit, and NEVER harm them.
THIS is what makes GNU/Linux special. Not the fact that it's generally free of charge.
Now you've learned this, you will know why it's impossible for any true Libre Linux user to ever go back to proprietary software. It doesn't respect him or his freedom.
Now that you're back, you have a ton of distros to choose from. Personally I use LMDE 6 but regular Mint is also great.
As for software, you may have to give up on some proprietary stuff if there is no FOSS equivalent but it's worth it because you get your freedom in exchange.
If you depend on that software to make a living, simply install Oracle Virtualbox and run Windows in a VM just to run that software.
At least it can't affect your Linux system and your main OS will be FOSS and when you're done using your proprietary program, shutdown Winblows and it goes away until next time you need it.
Everything you typed out was a painful rediscovery on my part. I basically had to ignore my principles at every moment, but using Windows eventually became too gross, I had to get out.
For the money I spent experimenting with proprietary software, I could have donated to projects making the alternatives.
This is not a lesson I will need to learn again.
Don't be too hard on yourself. The Linux path can be frustrating because you just wish the stuff was there that you need. And the pull of proprietary is the seeming ease with which you can get that stuff over there.
But it's a bitter sweet trap. We all go though this until we realise we aren't willing to take that crap anymore and we'll just make due without that program/app and find another way to get stuff done.
Same, I switched to windows for a while for work and it was hell. None of the kde window management (using mod key for moving and resizing windows) and the Adobe and autodesk softwares wanted to take over my computer with their genuine, license, desktop "service" apps. I felt like i broke my kneecaps on purpose to walk on crutches. And pressing mod key opens the fucking ad start menu every single time, I hate it. Went back to Linux using photopea and inkscape.
Never heard of Photopea! I will check it out. GIMP sucks at text boxes for some reason, and honestly is kind of unacceptable the way it handles it.
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Technically, I've done as you've described several times over. Did it with IOS and Android - I approached both with an open wallet and open to doing things differently than I was used to. Could say the same for several gaming consoles and Chrome. ALL have required concessions on my part that left a bad taste in my mouth - speaking strictly from a User Experience perspective.
The worst of it has been all the apps that dissappeared from the IOS Appstore - apps I paid for and now all that's available are pale imitations full of ads and demanding subscriptions.
I'm not asking the same apps to work across multiple decades either - the gap between my first iPad and my second was less than eight years.
Delisting should be a crime.
Nope, I am starting to see software like books. Maybe the author has more to say, but barring any grammatical or logical errors, they are basically evergreen.
That's probably the number one reason I will never use iOS on my phone, I couldn't imagine not having backups of the best version of the apps I paid for, and not being able to stick to that version, and keep using it on newer phones.
I use an iPad and I got screwed of course as you mentioned, so now I only use it for streaming apps and that's it.
I think Windows does some things well, that are just worse in KDE
- Ctrl+Alt+Delete, Taskmanager is actually privileged and can force close running apps. On KDE the same apps exist but they are not privileged enough. EDIT: of course it is privileged, but it doesnt even open if the "Desktop" hangs. There seems to be no privilege isolation, nothing left as security space for these tasks.
- The UI is more stable, the bars dont weirdly load, App Windows just open in full size and not fly around. When an app crashes I can still use the cursor (often)
The Rest is crap, like everything. Updates are horrible and intrusive without a single reason. Immutable updates are so much better, regular Linux Distros probably cant compare regarding security.
Taskmanager is actually privileged and can force close running apps. On KDE the same apps exist but they are not privileged enough
You can right-click on a process and select Send Signal → Kill. It will then ask for elevated privileges, if you're trying to kill a process not directly started by you.
If you mean that some program really hangs your whole session, well, the last-ditch option is to switch to a TTY and kill it from there. But yeah, that one isn't equipped with a nice GUI...
I have tried to use and like KDE so many times... I always go back to XFCE or GNOME.
Press ctrl+alt+esc. The cursor will change into a red skull and when you click a window, the process running it will be instakilled. Press esc again to cancel. That's much better than going through task manager, finding the right process and then killing it.
This is X11 only.
Eh, I can't use windows for any longer amount of time. I am WAY too paranoid. I always get the feeling of being spied on when I use windows. Like this slight nagging feeling in the back of my head. Never at ease as I am with linux.
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I'm running windows and others craps at work.
Like this, its working as a daily vaccine for me 🤣
Daily Linux user since 2013, specifically since the Snowden's leaks.
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Have you considered Bitwig Studio? It has native linux support.
Reaper as well.
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Nextcloud or a samba server are good options. But if storage is not a issue I'd recommend checking out syncthing. I run it on my server and sync some directories to my phone and other directories to my desktop. And one directory between phone and desktop(obsidian notes). I don't think you can run sycthing on iphones though.
I will try syncthing. I don't actually want cloud storage, I just want to be able to mirror files to my different computers for easy access without messing about using flashdrives or bluetooth.
When I was still new to Linux I also had these phases from time to time where I went back to Windows, used mainstream software, like Microsoft Office, etc.. I was still undecided if Linux was really worth all the hassle and I wasn't quite settled on either side.
But I always returned to Linux for whatever reason. Probably because using Windows just didn't feel right ... The times where I returned to Windows got rarer and shorter the older I got. The last time I used Windows for an extensive amount of time was during the Windows 10 beta period. I even had a Windows Phone for a year! I returned to Linux roughly once Windows 10 was released as stable (funnily enough).
I believe that you are likely in a very similar situation at the moment as I was. I think you might just need some time to settle with something and get comfortable. ;)
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You and I are in similar situations. I discovered Linux around 15 years ago and I wanted to fully switch over to it but found I couldn’t run games or photo/video/sound editing software the way I knew how (grew up with sailors discounts on the Adobe Suite).
Nowadays most of my previous hangups are solved. Almost all of my steam games work in Linux without any issue (1 or 2 games needed a single google search to paste the change needed to fix something), GIMP and Inkscape have way more extensions that increase QOL (not to mention Photopea being a literally photoshop clone with the exact same keyboard commands so your workflow doesn’t need to be relearned).
The only computers running windows in my house are my server (cause I just repurposed it and it’s working for now) and my VR computer (and that’s just because I’m lazy too since the Valve Index is fully Linux supported).
I use Windows at work and have no other choice. I don’t want any of my other computers to feel like my work computer. Feels like I haven’t left work.
Using Windows made me appreciate Linux harder than I ever have. Windows just feels gross now.
Insync supports OneDrive on Linux, been using it for a long time although I don’t touch cloud storage that much. I like having local copies of everything that does happen to be in the cloud.
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