Preach man, Fedora worked great for everything except the COPR for yabridge was no up to date and you had to go through command line hell to get it to work. I switched a while after that to PopOS which I use now.

I’m a fairly capable tech guy, but I’m an artist. I wanna make music at 3 am when I have a song stuck in my head, not troubleshoot.

Yabridge works on my install of PopOS, but the VSTs that I use just don’t work except for one. And I spent around $300 on them collectively over the last 9 years or however long its been.

Also annoying that I can’t look at YouTube at all while Reaper is open. Straight up won’t play the video. Not great when I’m trying to troubleshoot why a VST isn’t working and I have to close the program I’m trying to troubleshoot.

Despite my issues with Music production, I’m still glad I switched to Linux. I don’t have to worry about my PC shutting off randomly to do updates, I can install whatever software I want, no one spies on me, I’m loving it for all those reasons.

I am giving up on making music in Linux, but aside from that, everything else will be done on my main machine. I’m making an offline only Windows box specifically for music production and nothing else. No internet access. It will only access my local network for file transfer.

In short, totally agree, but I paid money for Windows only VSTs years ago before i switched and they sound too good man. Also Reaper keeps crashing with native linux VSTs so really not here for that.

If you can do everything on Linux, that’s great. Its just less stable and polished for creative work IMO.

That makes sense, was thinking of buying a new KVM so that’s likely the path I’ll take.

Much appreciated.

Unfortunately its a no name KVM I bought used off eBay so no specs I can find, but I think you and Blue_Morpho hit the nail on the head.

I’m going to do some testing after work and see if I can maybe find specs, maybe a workaround if there is one. Was thinking of buying a new KVM anyways so if all else fails, I’ll just shop around.

Thank you very much for your help.

Wasn’t a fan of mint when I tried it. IMO, I found popOS to be an overall better experience when I first started using Linux and have since switched back to it after having a few issues on Fedora.

You might give that a shot especially if you are using nivida. PopOS hasn’t given me much grief (aside from Gnome but that’s more a personal distaste for it)

Even after being on Linux for a year and considering myself a fairly capable guy in tech, Linux is kind of a pain in the ass if you’re doing more complicated things like in my case music production.

But it sounds like you’ve had an even worse go doing normal things which sucks. I feel for you man. I hope your next go is better.

It took me a few tries and Windows being a privacy nightmare to switch. It can be done but it wasn’t (and still isnt) easy.

He is an absolute menace for me since I work from home most of the week. He’s my little guy and as annoying as he can be, I wouldn’t want it any other way.

And yes I constantly annoy him with squishing his face, pinching his cheeks, picking him up which he does not like but tolerates for 10 seconds, and playing hitting him which he loves because he’s a sadist and just likes being touched in almost any way.

Most of the time, he’s right next to me if not near me.

Right now, he believes it is cuddle time:

For HBO, I dont think so.

And thinking about it now, i was watching Netflix with my GF the other day at my place using her account, didn’t look like 480p at least. That said, hard for me to tell since my internet rn is limited and i stream most things at 480p, sometimes 720p if its a good day.

I’m probably not the best barometer for stream quality give my situation. Atm I’m just glad it works.

I’m using firefox with drm content turned on and thats all I’ve done.

Not netflix no, after one of the price hikes a couple years back i dont subscribe to them anymore. Hulu worked fine if i remember correctly. Hbo works fine for me rn.

While not perfect, pop os does the job.

I actually made a similar post on this a while back and never quite found what i was looking for.

Ultimately, i just settled for using popos with it scaled up so i could use it easier with a remote i have. Works fine for my needs.

This is rough man, I’m really sorry to hear all that. Christmas is supposed to be a happy time for everyone even without all the gifts.

Maybe instead of gifts for your kids like physical things, plan a day with just you and them. Do something fun as a family or with each of them individually. Memories like that they can cherish for a long time after this year and gifts dont have to be material.

Given what you said, it sounds like you could use a day of fun with them.

I agree with this. I’m using a 1070ti for image gen and it would be more than capable for handling some LLM stuff. An AMD 7700xt ive found dors well with 7B models on my main rig but im sure you could get away with somthing cheaper or less powerful.

That said, the amount of text you can genrate or the context length of its answers will depend the model you use and the larger the model, the more power it takes.

If youre just messing around with it or want it to review or answer small questions, I’d say a 1070ti like I’m using would be just fine. Some folks use even more budget friendly options. If you got a gaming machine with any semi recent GPU, I’d say go for it. Worst case, you can pay for a subscription later if you really want.

Oh interesting. I may look into that. Thank you for the suggestion!

Wouldn’t exactly fit my use case because this pc also doubles as my game in bed pc and is what I’m currently using for ai image generation. If i could get big picture mode but still run applications that arent games or for streaming, that’d be ideal. From the recommendations, seems like kodi is a fan favorite but not exactly a DE either. Might work but I’d rather it be a DE than an app i have to run but beggers cant be choosers.

That said, I have 2 chunky servers that my buddy gave me recently and I’m planning on self hosting a lot of things with them which likely include jellyfin.

I will say that im slowly getting the internet to a decent spot at least for streaming, generally as long as my connection is fast enough between starlink and my lte connection (using failover with pfsense) i can usually stream ok. Though with one tower in my area and trees surrounding my place, its never gonna be great.

My desktop pc runs Fedora with Wayland currently and it works really well. I like wayland a lot and was trying to use it on my media pc as well but it wasnt playing well with Firefox for video playback. Not sure if this was fixed yet or if it was even a bug but it was not good when i tried it on kubuntu. Haven’t tried it om popos yet but it might just be an issue with gnome. Ive never been a fan of gnome ever since i started messing around with linux.

Love kde plasma though, its def the best DE ive found so far. Coming from Windows and all the customization it has, its so nice.

I mostly use this pc as a streaming box for online content like youtube or crunchyroll so not really sure kodi would fit that anyways. Will probably have jellyfin up again at some point so might use kodi for that? Idk, mot something im doing anytime soon.

Rn im using the default for PopOS and like you, scaled the ui. Its fine, but not quite right yknow? Ui scaling in Linux hasnt ever felt quite right to me especially when I’m using a tv.

I also use this pc to do other things so its not just a media PC all the time which is another reason why i was looking for a desktop environment rather than a whole new os.

Is mate pretty good for scaling well? I havent used it before but a small gripe is that the default for pop doesnt scale well when the taskbar always shows. Applications get cut off at the bottom. Pretty annoying.

Ah good to know. I thought they looked interesting and very customizable which is why i though it was a legit recommendation lol.

For this pc, wayland support isn’t much of a concern atm but also good to know. Appreciate the info :)

Both of those look interesting. Thank you!

I have looked at kodi briefly, not sure if its exactly what I’m looking for but could be a viable option. Have heard a lot of good things about it of course. Appreciate the suggestion!

Older thinkpads would come to mind, usually a good option. Generally affordable, repairable, and can be good for Linux.