For like a month or two I decided, screw it, I am going to use all the programs I cannot use on Linux. This was mostly games and music making software.

I guess it was fun for a bit, tries different DAWs, did not play a single game because no time.

Basically, it was not worth it. The only thing I enjoyed was OneDrive, because having your files available anywhere is dope, but I also hate it because it wants to delete your local files. I think that was on me.

Anyways, I am back. Looking at Nextcloud. Looking at Ardour. I am fine paying for software, but morally I got to support and learn the tools that are available to me and respect FOSS. (Also less expensive… spent a lot on my experiment).

Anyone done this? Abondoned their principles thinking the grass would be greener, but only to look at their feet coverered in crap (ads, intrusive news, just bad UI).

I don’t know. I don’t necesarily regret it, but I won’t be doing it again. What I spent is a sunk cost, but some has linux support, and VSTs for download. So, I shall see.

  •  donuts   ( @donuts@kbin.social ) 
    4•8 months ago

    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.

    •  Pantherina   ( @Pantherina@feddit.de ) 
      2•8 months ago

      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?

      •  donuts   ( @donuts@kbin.social ) 
        3•8 months ago

        Uh, yeah… So, basically I use an ubuntu:latest (LTS) distrobox container which has:

        1. Its own $HOME, specified using the --home parameter when making a distrobox container.
        2. Wine-staging
        3. Yabridge
        4. Bitwig Studio 5 (the Linux .deb version, installed with dpkg to the default location)
        5. A whole bunch of Linux native plugins (like Modartt Pianoteq, installed wherever but then with the .so’s symlinked into my ~/.vst dirs).
        6. 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.)
        7. 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. :)