A musician tells his story of switching from Mac to Ubuntu • Hacker News Board

Re: A musician tells his story of switching from Mac to Ubuntu

#21

Post by brusch » Mon, Mar 14, 2011, 10:02 AM UTC

bryanh wrote: post #4

I've spent a lot of time dabbling with digital audio (especially recording) and my limited experience with Linux audio setups were difficult to say the least. Now, this may be changing with Ubuntu Studio, but unfortunately a majority of commercial hardware is still strictly Windows/Mac (and sometimes spotty at that). Our mostly self-recorded/produced/mixed album ( http://glasscannonband.com/albums/the-chill-room ) wa…

I've recorded probably about 30 songs in Ardour on linux and probably had one crash at all.

Best thing is to start with a distribution with audio focus (I'm using AVLinux http://www.bandshed.net/AVLinux.html). Then the base system is set up the correct way for your hardware.

Re: A musician tells his story of switching from Mac to Ubuntu

#22

Post by jasonlotito » Mon, Mar 14, 2011, 11:54 AM UTC

rorrr wrote: post #6

I recently had to install Ubuntu for work. Before that I normally used Win7 at home (+ unix shell at work via Putty). Things that Ubuntu sucks at: 1) Power management. It really blows. a) My laptop keeps shutting down without any warning that the battery is low, and half the time Ubuntu doesn't even know whether my laptop is plugged or running off of battery. b) My laptop is blasting the CPU cooler at full power, all…

If it makes you feel better, most of those issues are issues if you moved to Mac as well. Not the power management issue, but then, if you purchased a laptop made for Ubuntu, I imagine you'd have more success. =)

Re: A musician tells his story of switching from Mac to Ubuntu

#23

Post by jarek » Mon, Mar 14, 2011, 12:12 PM UTC

Bud wrote: post #2

This guy's talking about how his G4 Powerbook started 'showing signs of age' during 2009. Well, yeah. That would stand to reason.

Ti or alu? A 2005 laptop showing signs of age in 2009 is kinda weak.

Signed, an eight-year-old Thinkpad user.

Re: A musician tells his story of switching from Mac to Ubuntu

#24

Post by smilliken » Mon, Mar 14, 2011, 12:19 PM UTC

rorrr wrote: post #6

I recently had to install Ubuntu for work. Before that I normally used Win7 at home (+ unix shell at work via Putty). Things that Ubuntu sucks at: 1) Power management. It really blows. a) My laptop keeps shutting down without any warning that the battery is low, and half the time Ubuntu doesn't even know whether my laptop is plugged or running off of battery. b) My laptop is blasting the CPU cooler at full power, all…

7) try alt + arrow keys

Re: A musician tells his story of switching from Mac to Ubuntu

#25

Post by Symmetry » Mon, Mar 14, 2011, 1:57 PM UTC

rorrr wrote: post #6

I recently had to install Ubuntu for work. Before that I normally used Win7 at home (+ unix shell at work via Putty). Things that Ubuntu sucks at: 1) Power management. It really blows. a) My laptop keeps shutting down without any warning that the battery is low, and half the time Ubuntu doesn't even know whether my laptop is plugged or running off of battery. b) My laptop is blasting the CPU cooler at full power, all…

1 and 3) Most of those problems look like they step from your laptop not having very good software drivers for Linux. What brand is it? Some laptop manufacturers like Lenovo put effort into making sure their products can be used under Linux, but other brands don't. Also, even if a laptop is new enough the drivers for it might not have made it into the distribution you're using yet. In the end, you expect Windows to Just Work on your laptop because Windows is installed by the laptop manufacturer. If you buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled you won't have any of these issues.

2) As for Photoshop, you can run it under Linux but it does take a bit of effort. http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&#38...

Re: A musician tells his story of switching from Mac to Ubuntu

#26

Post by th0ma5 » Mon, Mar 14, 2011, 2:57 PM UTC

to see what it was like, i wrote and recorded a whole CD on ubuntu http://sites.google.com/site/monorail42/ ... mostly with rosegarden. it was sort of painful to do! i also used a set of python scripts called MMA to lay out the song structures.

Re: A musician tells his story of switching from Mac to Ubuntu

#27

Post by jerf » Mon, Mar 14, 2011, 3:58 PM UTC

jarek wrote: post #23

Bud wrote: post #2

This guy's talking about how his G4 Powerbook started 'showing signs of age' during 2009. Well, yeah. That would stand to reason.

Ti or alu? A 2005 laptop showing signs of age in 2009 is kinda weak. Signed, an eight-year-old Thinkpad user.

On tour duty? Believe me, it's still a testament to the laptop's quality if it stood up to four years of touring.

Re: A musician tells his story of switching from Mac to Ubuntu

#28

Post by jerf » Mon, Mar 14, 2011, 4:04 PM UTC

rorrr wrote: post #6

I recently had to install Ubuntu for work. Before that I normally used Win7 at home (+ unix shell at work via Putty). Things that Ubuntu sucks at: 1) Power management. It really blows. a) My laptop keeps shutting down without any warning that the battery is low, and half the time Ubuntu doesn't even know whether my laptop is plugged or running off of battery. b) My laptop is blasting the CPU cooler at full power, all…

Ubuntu is great at power management (or, more accurately, Linux in general), but if your laptop isn't supported for whatever reason Ubuntu is just screwed and there's nothing it can do.

5: The problem is actually that there are two copy and paste buffer in X Windows. There's the mouse selection buffer, which is copied on any highlight operation, and pasted via right mouse button, and the "conventional clipboard", populated by an explicit copy and pasted via explicit paste. This is further screwed up by the fact that few programmers have understood this and a large number of programs have tried to "fix" what they perceived as bugs in the clipboard in various horrific ways. See [1]. In particular, it seems like the programs that correctly deselect text when somebody else grabs primary has been going down lately. I've had a pretty good run with this actually working as designed on KDE lately, but recent Gnomes seem to be going back to mucking with it and I've been having trouble, and Chromium itself also seems dubious.

3 and 7 sounds like more poorly-supported hardware. Unfortunately, your Linux experience with proprietary hardware with no released documentation will always be bad. The situation is ever-improving but still not perfect. It is possible and maybe even likely your laptop will never work properly under Linux.

[1]: http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html

Re: A musician tells his story of switching from Mac to Ubuntu

#29

Post by Bud » Mon, Mar 14, 2011, 4:24 PM UTC

jarek wrote: post #23

Bud wrote: post #2

This guy's talking about how his G4 Powerbook started 'showing signs of age' during 2009. Well, yeah. That would stand to reason.

Ti or alu? A 2005 laptop showing signs of age in 2009 is kinda weak. Signed, an eight-year-old Thinkpad user.

He didn't say it was a 2005 version; it could have been a 2001 version for all we know.

Also, I owned and used a G4 PowerBook from 2002 til 2010, when I sold it to a friend, who is still using it. I bow to nobody in my respect for the longevity of Apple's laptops lately. Just saying, if he had it for 4-8 years and was touring with it, yeah, it's kinda not shocking that it might show its age a bit.

You think a low-end plastic Dell (which will be far slower than the Mac he'd get) will beat an Apple over 4+ years as a touring musician? I don't.

It'd be nice, as an aside, if there were more dates and details in this story. Wonder why he didn't include those.

Re: A musician tells his story of switching from Mac to Ubuntu

#30

Post by ssharp » Mon, Mar 14, 2011, 6:33 PM UTC

fooandbarify wrote: post #11

mitjak wrote: post #9

A musician and, more importantly, a computer geek tells his story of switching from Mac to Ubuntu His story, while informative, is nowhere near close to that of a typical musician or even audio geek. It's not the platform but the software running on it that counts. The first thing Apple did when they bought Emagic and, as a result, Logic Pro was to kill the product on Windows knowing well users would switch to OS X j…

Exactly. On top of that, popular DAWs have significant eco-systems built up around them - it isn't unusual for professional users to have hundreds or even thousands of dollars invested in plugins, making it more difficult to jump ship.

Forget about the money for a second; what about the time?

To a producer/artist, the DAW + plugins is another instrument that takes time to master. Unless there is a really great reason to make a change, why bother? I can move pretty quickly through Logic and Pro Tools, but I spent years working towards that. There is no way I'd even consider making a change unless another piece of software offered some incredible feature or drastically improved workflow.