I’m about to try Ubuntu again.

I switched to Fedora for a few months, and really prefer it over Ubuntu . Clean Gnome. dnf is great. Useful COPRs. It just makes sense. But in my Sisyphian attempts to switch to Linux as my platform for music production (with my existing paid vsts and sound libraries), I hit one brick wall too many. Things that worked no longer work. Things that I could never get to work remain unworking.

So, going to try Ubuntu. I dislike snaps. I dislike the twisted Gnome UI. I will say the Ubuntu fonts are nice though (I actually imported them into Fedora…)

The further I stray from a default install, the harder it is to maintain going forward. Fingers crossed for Ubuntu.

Note that if you want actual virtualization then perhaps Proxmox (not sure if it manages multiple hypervisors - I haven’t obtained something to test it on yet). Portainer is best for Docker management (it, and it’s client agents, run as docker containers themselves. Don’t forget to enable web sockets if proxying.

Give portainer a try. It’s actually pretty good for getting a birdseye view, and let’s you manage more than one docker server.

It’s not perfect of course.

Pfblockerng on pfsense is very powerful.

Can you not just backup the pg txn logs (with periodic full backups, purged in accordance with your needs?). That’s a much safer way to approach DBs anyway.

(exclude the online db files from your file system replication)

Absolutely correct.

I AM shaking my head… 🙂

I thought that was Shaking My Head…? Similar uses, I guess. But if it’s as you say, I may stop using.

IBM PC, circa 1982(?)

Lol - I was parodying your comment, actually 🙂. Not sure if fingerprint is standard api, but I suspect there is some proprietary stuff going on.

In the end it’s not about blaming Linux, it’s about getting adoption to a critical mass where commercial entities can realize a business case to support. Then the ecosystem will thrive.

Linux (and BSD for router workload) absolutely owns the server world. Even MS let’s you run SQL Server on Linux). The desktop isn’t there yet wrt adoption, but it’s growing. Things like fingerprint sensors are definitely in the desktop (closer to end user) world and if it’s the business use case that is the area of most growth, as I suspect it is (in India, especially) then I think these sorts of modules have higher likelihood of being adopted.

Exactly! But I really, really hope that the growing share in India and other places starts to catalyze commercial development.

Immutable packages like flatpak (or whatever is your format of choice) makes the software side way, way easier. It’ll take a bit more convincing to get HW makers to dive in though.

It’s no joke making supported software let alone HW for multiple flavours sites of kernel, architecture.

It’s a lot better than 25 years ago when I used as a daily driver, but we’re just not quite there yet. I keep trying!

Interestingly, a friend of mine just sent me this https://www.musicradar.com/news/linux-studio.

I will try to help him out with it - it’s promising, as he does not have the hardware/workflow obstacles that I have, but he’s also not as technically minded. I actually really hope becomes workable for him.

Update - it’s ultimately a non-starter, I’m afraid. A nightmare in trying to integrate unsupported HW (Line 6, etc - forgot about those ones…)

Frustrating. Naively, I keep trying and bashing my head into that wall…

These aren’t Linux issues that Windows does better. It’s just companies that decided their hardware shouldn’t run by Linux.

Personally, I hope the market share grows sufficiently that commercial enterprises start to develop for it. With the direction windows is going we need alternatives more than ever.

Well, the question was essentially along the lines of “What works better on Windows than on Linux” so I figured it was fair game to answer based on my experience.

I do hope that situation improves (it is - but there still are meaningful gaps for my purposes).

Ah yes - Native Instruments. It’s both HW and SW. I should have been more clear. No joy on Ubuntu - the issue is the HW driver. The HW is simply unsupported. (someone wrote a driver to partially allow midi mode on an older version of the HW, but it’s completely hobbled and, I fear, makes my point more loudly than I could if it didn’t exist. FWIW, only the older Native Instruments installers will run under wine - the new ones leverage certain features of windows that apparently will never be supported by wine, so I have little confidence in wine-based solutions for anything I need to depend on going forward.

Apple makes great computers, but… I can’t stand them. You’re in a walled proprietary garden and it drives me bonkers. I also have similar suspicions wrt their privacy practices.

Windows, for me, works well enough (I can get it to do everything I need) but I have grave concerns about privacy and a really, really don’t like their AI direction. It’s the opposite of what I want in a computer.

I’ve considered going full Linux as hypervisor with Windows as guest, but it’s really not that easy to actually use beyond a theoretical proof of concept once you start managing large sound libraries.

Would like to get back to Linux as daily driver as I did years ago and actually do run it on a few old laptops. (I wish there was a better email client - the only one that seems to successfully support oauth2 is thunderbird, and it’s more than a bit unwieldy for large mailboxes (especially with its circa 1997 design aesthetic…)

Anyway - I really, really want to find a way to make a leap to Linux (again) but it’s currently not feasible, no matter how hard I bang my head against that particular wall…

Adobe lightroom (with its multi-device editing and catalogue management - even when only using its cloud for smart previews).

Hardware support for music. NI Maschine is a non-starter. Most other devices are, at best, a ‘hope it works’ but are most definitely unsupported.

Music software. You can hack your way into getting a lot of your paid modules to work, but it is certainly not supported.

Wine is ‘fun’(?), but it’s a game of whack-a-mole chasing windows’ tail and will never allow everything to run. Either way it’s not 'supported.

Businesses any any size tend to eschew SW/HW that doesn’t have formal support. (things like RHEL are most definitely supported as servers and orgs certainly leverage it).

I keep installing Linux hoping I can get a sufficient amount stuff to work “well enough” to move on from windows but it’s just not to be (yet). Hope it changes, but it’ll require buy-in from commercial product developers. I hope as Linux continues to grow a foothold in desktop installs, a critical mass will be reached, commercial devs take notice and it’ll be easier to switch.

For now, I’m stuck with Windows and WSL. (But I am not happy with Windows’ direction).

Perhaps. We probably could have sealed things better in jars, but it sure was a big and disconcerting mess.

I love the principle of buying from bulk store but after a non-zero number of weevil infestations I tread carefully. Could just be bad luck though.

Not sure I follow (especially wrt poor kids?) - maybe I’m just missing the reference. I applaud using Linux on old stuff to breath life into it. But I suspect mass adoption would be harder than one might think. Easy to convince tech savvy folk to dive in and wrangle with it (for its numerous advantages and disadvantages), but the majority of folks won’t (they’d sooner move to Apple - with even more waste, proprietary bs, and cost).

Not saying this should be the case, merely that it is the case. (The more adoption, the better chance of better support from developers/HW manus, etc. There’s just a leap that seems very hard to make. Wish I knew how to bridge it, but the obstacles seem less of a technical thing than a social/psychological thing)