I’m new on openSUSE TW , and kinda new on Linux in general.
I tried a lot of other distros like Mint, Ubuntu/Ubuntu Studio, Fedora Jam, AVLinux.
But my old AMD FX-6300 based machine didn’t liked them giving me a lot of system internal errors and app crashes.
About a month ago I gave chance to openSUSE Tumbleweed with the help from geekosDAW project/scripts( I’m also a member of their Telegram Group). I haven’t played around yet with my DAW to see how it goes, but so far I installed REAPER and some other audio plugins that aren’t included in repos and the experience is so much reliable it will stay like this especially when I sit down to make some beats.
For the most part I made the jump because the windows 10 end of support , and I got tired of how bloated they are even if you use chris tittus winutil script.
I wish to everyone a nice & peaceful summer and forgive my not so good english
Welcome to the community
I also use reaper, bitwig, musescore, and guitarix on and off, and only had a few issues here and there. Linux has become quite good for audio work, just like it did with games, and opensuse is the best distro I tried so far.
Also, if you feel like tumbleweed is too unstable, but you still want to use a rolling distro, I can recommend slowroll. I use it on my laptop and I never had any stability issues with it.
I’m more familiar with reaper, I had a little experience with bitwig from the dark side but I gave up on all software solutions from the dark side. except that bitwig’s buisness model is kinda meh because your payment covers you only for a one year of updates , as a software is so much more convenient and kinda out of the box experience. But reaper in particular it’s the most lightweight for my system maybe even Ardour which but I didn’t open it yet just because on my previous distro’s that I tried it gave me some xruns and crashes and I’m not at all familiar with Ardour’s preferences . More importantly my workflow is hybrid for the most part, I have a Roland VERSELAB MV-1 on the making part and if I want to make further edits/cuts and more deeper mixing etc. I export the stems on the SD card and import them into reaper. But sometimes I’m just starting and ending in the DAW.
If something goes wrong I’ll give a watch on slowroll and thank you for the suggestion.
So far luckily even from general use perspective I’m very satisfied with openSUSE.
I’ve recorded, mixed, and mastered an entire album on TW. I am however, not using geekosDAW, but I have been looking in to it.
The two main DAW’s I use are Reaper and SONAR Cakewalk HS 7, of which both work perfectly(Sonar about 97% works). I use the Windows 32bit version of Reaper under wine as I use quite a bit of 32bit Windows plugins and they tend not to work at all under the Linux version, and they tend to be a bit buggy under the Windows x64 version.
If you are planning to use a great number of Windows native plugins, my best advice to you would be to make sure you have your standard Btrfs partitions and snapper set up for roll back. As well, keep tabs on your wine when doing zypper dups. That will be your biggest snags. If you can, use bottles for contained wine versions for everything you need to keep up and running.
If you ever run in to problems, there are many of us here who are ready and able to help. Best of luck to ya!
I’m not planning at least for now to use non Linux native plugins or apps, that maybe will change in the future but not 100%. I selected on the installation point the box that says make multiple partitions to take advantage of snapshots (I don’t know if I missed any step for the roll back),and also I have my two hard drives (ssd) with btrfs the main drive is the OS and the second for sample libraries reaper projects and in general data.
it will stay like this especially when I sit down to make some beats.
