Originally Posted By: justanoldmuso
i'm as geeky as the next bloke , but 'i'm curious what to use linux for..cos i have an old i5 laptop
here.
the reason I'm asking is because the 100 bucky chromebook I picked up already does soooo much.

also gordon whaddya think bout dam small linux. distro ?

this is a tech company i'm watching right now…mini pc new.

https://www.geekompc.com/geekom-mini-it11-mini-pc/

ie 11 gen i7/i5 …

they also do ..celerons. <<<celerons poor single thread passmark for music .

best

om

My fastest machine here at the moment is the i5-750 that I'm on right now. My music PC and my notepad are both Celeron series, not core-i series. The notepad is fine with Linux, though can struggle a bit with PianoTeq, which is CPU intensive.

They all have the usual domestic stuff like web browsers, office suites, email, various graphics tools, various video tools, various audio tools. I use my office machine for development work with multiple IDEs for different languages/targets (I'm mostly an embedded developer). The only thing I can think of off-hand that I need to use Windows for is my PCB CAD and in truth, I haven't tried that recently in Wine on Linux. Oh ... I have a USB sniffer that is Windows only, but I haven't used that for ages.

Most installations are painless. The install process identifies all the hardware and installs modules, if required, to suit. There are post installation tools to install the many applications that are freely available. To be frank, there are probably thousands of them now, many free but enterprise grade, some not so great. I make donations for quite a bit that I use as people put their own time and effort into making them.

There are commercial applications, too, and I'm more than happy to pay for them and use them when appropriate. My main IDE is commercial (and around $1500), though these days and for many jobs, the open-source Eclipse is nearly as good and support a great many targets. I mostly use ARM.

I have Linux native commercial version of Reaper, Mixbus, Renoise, Traktion, PianoTeq, Transcribe!, maybe others.

Video editors are a little fragile still, but a friend who's a retired profession video editor says he likes Olive.

In the past I used to spend some time investigating whether hardware was Linux supported. These days I rarely do, as most is. Firewire support is a bit hit-and-miss. That is worth checking if you use it.

What's not so easy to explain is the stuff that's on Linux that isn't on Windows. though an awful lot of good Linux stuff has been ported across now (Ardour, for example).


The thing to remember is that Linux is different from Windows and packages like LibreOffice (ported to ages ago Windows), for example, is different from Microsoft Office, so there's a bit of a learning curve. On Linux, you're more likely to be advised to use the command-line for some jobs. Very often the command to use are given in the examples. Just cut and paste, though the familiar Ctrl-X/Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V aren't available on the command line, so one has to use menu->Edit->Cut and so on. They work in most GUIs.

Jazz relative beginner, starting at a much older age than was helpful.
Kawai MP6, Korg M50, Ui24R, Saffire Pro 40.
AVL:MXE Linux; Windows 11; Win8.1: Scarletts
BIAB2022 UltraPAK, Reaper, a bunch of stuff.