Hello community,
I am tired of windows slowing down my laptop, and I tought I’d give linux a chance. So I learn, that there are many linuxes, and I wonder if it really matters. which one to choose. Can all linux apps be run on all distributions? Is it just a matter of the ‘app store’ supporting them or not?
I am producing media art for theatre plays. So I have to rely on a stable system as well as the following tools:
- Blender 3d
- a DAW
- Design Software (adobe alternatives)
- Video Editing & compositing
- Projection mapping (I fear, there is just mapmap under linux)
- audio cuing (linux show player)
- maybe also light show programming (artnet / dmx)
The machine would be a Gigabyte Aero 15x with a dedicated nvidia gfx card, and 8 gigs of ram.
What would you recommend me?
@StrongFox Give a try Tromjaro. User friendly and very well maintained.
I feel like this is a bad recommendation for someone coming from Windows, it’s quite an opinionated distro.
Considering windows is the complete opposite of trade free I doubt a windows user would be willing to compromise convenience for a philosophy that they probably don’t share.
I recommend Linux Mint. It’s based on Ubuntu with all the same benefits but without the drawbacks. Mint is lighter, faster and very stable. Looks visually similar to Windows and is more complete and ready for use than Ubuntu.
Ubuntu uses the Gnome desktop which is heavy on RAM and needs extensions to be really useful. Mint uses their own Cinnamon desktop and it’s highly optimised, full featured and ready to go.
It also automatically makes backups of your system incase anything goes wrong.
Highly recommend.
Pretty much any distro will do, but Ubuntu-based ones tend to be easier to use due to having menus and buttons for most everything. As for apps, here are my suggestions
3D
Blender
DAW
Ardour
LMMS
Bitwig
~VIDEO EDITING~
Davinci Resolve (if on Nvidia)
Kdenlive
Olive (alpha software, be wary of crashes and save often)
IMAGES
GIMP
Krita
Photopea (web app)
Inkscape
Lights may be possible with OpenRGB but I haven’t personally messed with these kinda of software
Also scribus can be extremely clunky if you need to make flyers inkscape may be easier.
I’ve made 60 page brochures in Scribus on several occasions without real issues.
However you have to know a bit (not necessarily a lot, but at least understand what you’re doing) of typography, and using styles is absolutely essential.
It’s a quirky program but it works fine.
Fedora or Ubuntu/Ubuntu based both are very beginner friendly and stable, both have wide community support and both have user friendly app centers.
Most mainstream distros will work with pretty much all of the software suggestions. I tend to avoid recommending Ubuntu these days as Canonical have some stubborn ideas regarding things (snaps should have been shelved long ago in favour of flatpack), that said, PoP-Os is an excellent choice for buntu based without the snaps.
Video,editing: shotcut is pretty good alongside Kdenlive. For anyone working with audio, Audacity is a definite must have for track/sample editing and effects. Whilst Ardour is an extremely capable DAW, there are others you might want to check out, LMMS is a nice sequencer (fruity loops) DAW for example. On the professional side there is Bitwig (never used it but heard good things about it) and my personal favourite Reaper.
