Short version: Please tell me your favourit distro(s) for making music and why.
Long version/my use case: I’ve actually recently decided to migrate to a laptop setup from desktop. I’ve already decided on the laptop and will be running a dual boot setup. I think between SuperCollider, Pd, and Reaper, Linux could have me mostly (maybe completely) covered.
It’s tempting to just go for Ubuntu Studio or AV Linux, as they seems to have plenty of stuff ready to go. But at the same time I kind of know the apps I want to use, and (I assume) I can just get them myself for just about any other distro. I don’t want to pick a distro just because it comes with a bunch of semi-relevant stuff. But maybe it’s worth doing just that?
If it helps, my background is DAWs (Cubase and Reaper mainly) with softsynth, a little bit of eurorack and a chunk of VCV Rack, and a sprinkling of MaxMSP. I also have a monome Norns shield, for which I am attempting to learn Lua. I have no background in programming but I am drawn to learning SuperCollider as well. I have both 5 pin and usb midi controllers, and a Steinberg UR22 mkII.
I started off with Ubuntu Studio when I first switched to Linux from Macs,… I dunno how long ago. Then I switched to regular Ubuntu with XFCE since I didn’t use half of what Ubuntu Studio came with and when Canonincal announced their IPO plans, figured I’d use it as an excuse to explore Debian so pretty much I just use Debian nowadays.
I tend to use SuperCollider (sometimes with TidalCycles running for live coding), Pure Data, Audacity, and very rarely a DAW (but if I do, Ardour). I use an RME Fireface UCX which is USB class-compliant I think it’s called(?). I dunno, I used go the normal JACK route with qjackctl but switched over the Pipewire (which I finally got down to usable latencies while playing a bass going through the interface without too many xruns) and qpwgraph for routing. I dunno, it just works more-or-less and isn’t so much trouble to set up (was a bit more painful with the normal JACK route and feeding PulseAudio into JACK and doing all the PulseAudio/JACK sink stuff, Pipewire has made that workflow significantly more streamlined).
Used to be a Ubuntu user but wasn’t a fan of the direction it was going a few years ago. Nowadays I am using Fedora and running Bitwig on it.
Iḿ quite happy with manjaro despite a few not so pretty incidents in the past. Endeavour OS seems a good choice too.
How old and how powerful is your computer?
You can run a DAW on any distro and it will work fine. If you want an environment tuned for audio, you can get a music-oriented distro, or get a normal distro and tweak it.
Ubuntu Studio is the popular one. But you can avoid the bloat of ubuntu by installing mint and then installing ubuntu studio controls. That’s what I’m using and it’s great. This applies to any ubuntu-based system (kubuntu, lubuntu, xubuntu, popos, etc).
Fedora Jam is apparently a good rival. I hear a lot of love for AV Linux too. I’ve never used either one.
Archlinux has a detailed section on setting up arch for pro audio, and that will apply to either manjaro or endeavouros too. I personally love arch and endeavouros. But the extra time for manual set up might not result in any benefit for you. but the real downside is that it’s potentially dangerous to wait a month without updating. If you stash your machine for three months and then update your rolling release distro, you might experience one of those horror stories of a broken system. Whereas with mint, you can install it and leave it alone for a year and it’s probably gonna be fine.
The big advantage of arch is that it will have updates for new hardware sooner than ubuntu-based distros. Aside from that, you install it for the fun of building it and the customization that’s offered to (forced upon) you.