2024 will be the year I finally be the year I ditch windows.
I am not exactly new to linux, yet I am far from an expert. I made my journey over the years form trying Ubuntu (many many major revisions ago) and have found myself down the rabbit hole of going Arch. I run Arch with KDE on my laptop. I want to fully ditch Windows on my desktop, however I feel this will be a much bigger hurdle to overcome.
Build Specs: i7-12700KF Copper Modded EVGA RTX 3090 64gb of 3600mhz DDR4 ASUS Tuf Z690 Wifi D4
I could go into more detail about my specs, but the specs aren’t what has made this journey a bit tougher. I use a Line 6 Helix and a Line 6 PowerCab 112+ and both have usb connections to my computer for integration with, you guessed it; windows or mac software only. Now I don’t have a problem running wine, and a number of other solutions to run windows programs, I do however have a gap in knowledge in order to try to use these specific programs with specific USB peripherals.
Now, I am not sure if this is the best way, but I had heard the idea of USB passthrough. And I have no clue where to begin with that. Would this be the direction I should be going for programs such as those?
The only other software that I am going to struggle replacing is the RGB lighting software for all of my hardware. Most of it is corsair (Fans, RAM, Water Cooler, and plugins for the asus motherboard.) And my Steeleseries keyboard which uses GG.
I have looked into using OpenRGB but I was unable to figure out how to get those setup as it wasn’t as plug and play as the manufacturer software, but understandably of course.
The absolute biggest hurdles is my Nvidia problem. I have always had issues with Nvidia on Arch. I would gladly take an suggestion. For reference, I would be using this mainly for my gaming. I occasionally dabble in Stable Diffusion.
I will be running Arch with KDE preferably, but every single time I have had issues.
I suppose any feedback anyone may have would be helpful.
Checklist of things I need to get working on in Arch, any help would be welcomed:
- Helix Guitar pedal and PowerCab 112+ (USB Passthrough or any other alternatives people may suggest)
- RGB for SteeleSeries Apex Pro (GG software on windows, open to alternatives)
- RGB for Corsair (iQue on windows, open to alternatives)
- Nvidia Drivers
Do you need the windows specific software? For the sound system it may work fine if it shows up as a sound card. For the pedal you could reverse engineer it as it can’t be that complicated.
For pass though its very simple. All you need is either boxes or virtual manager and a windows install disk. Make sure you install the virtio drivers for windows. You need them for reasonable performance and a shared clipboard. They can be downloaded from Fedora.
Well I need the Helix software which is more than just audio unfortunately. It updates firmware, as well as I can use the software to change effects on my pedal. I can do the same from the pedal, but my workflow is better handled with the PC app. The same goes for the Poweramp 112+.
I will check those out for sure.
Here’s the thing, I do have Reaper my chosen DAW as an option within Arch (or whatever distro I choose really) but VST support as well as support for my pedals all in the same box will be a challenge.
I was genuinely confused as to why you’d want to sit in the dark.
For Corsair - I’ve been very happy with ckb-next. https://github.com/ckb-next/ckb-next
It is pretty robust, allows remapping of key/button bindings, changing of RGB, DPI, etc. Their goal is to replace iCUE. Very robust for mice and keyboards, but they also list other hardware that it is known to work with in their wiki. Might be worth a look.
I have to keep a Windows install around for the sole purpose of pushing firmware updates to my Headrush pedal board. The installer will run on Linux with Wine, but it cannot detect the pedalboard through the USB connection.
I didn’t try it (because I didn’t have the need for it yet) but maybe https://wiki.winehq.org/Hardware#USB could help.
Try giving this a try. I found it suggested in the Arch wiki to update the bios. It’s basically a bootable Windows environment from a USB. You can then try running your firmware updates through it. It worked to update my bios so I assume it should easily work with updating firmware for other devices.
Hopefully it’s all a relatively painless & bug-free experience for ya.
Does your gear work with Guitarix?
