German federal office publishes Windows 10 telemetry analysis

If you're only using one monitor, then yea the easiest thing will be not passing through a card and just trying to reduce the various related latencies as much as you can.

The latency would be prohibitive for things like some games or video processing work but you could probably have an good experience with Ableton. And of course it's an iterative process, down the line you could decide you do want that extra monitor.

What kind of processor do you have?

> What I'd like ideally is to have my cake and eat it too - to be able to run Ubuntu, but have Ableton running just like a native window - so I can move it to any monitor, minimize it, etc.

Spice unfortunately doesn't have Seamless/Rootless window mode implemented yet (it's a pretty big undertaking) though it is planned eventually.

Even with Xen, where you could have paravirtualized windows that do exactly what you're describing (it's fantastic), it's only available for Linux VMs.

That said, I've heard of people wrapping apps as Windows RemoteApps and achieving seamless windows that way. There's a detailed guide explaining the process but expect to get your hands slightly dirty [0]. I haven't tried it myself so I can't offer any assistance there. However, it seems easy enough and the result looks very satisfying.

> Another problem I'm thinking about is that I won't be able to passthrough the soundcard to Windows and still have sound coming out of it from Ubuntu - so I'd need to use a second soundcard and then have a mixer to combine their outputs!

libvirt has emulated audio devices that work quite well. It should for the most part be seamless, but there is definitely a noticeable latency. This latency can be reduced but for me it wasn't enough. Also, this can be a big source of DPC latency which causes audio crackling.

You're right about both points: You can't share one soundcard with Windows and Ubuntu at the same time (if you want minimal latency) and you will need a second soundcard. If you only have one set of speakers and don't own separate monitors for Ableton (definitely worth investing in), you could use a cheap Y-cable at the cost of reduced max volume, and a slightly higher noise floor. A mixer would be the best longterm investment for the best sound,but depending on your budget/requirements for a mixer, a pair of monitors might not be much more.

Again, this is an incremental process. You can start with what you have and improve the experience slightly each month with a new purchase.

[0]https://bmullan.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/howto-integrate-win...

> https://askubuntu.com/questions/732967/how-to-fix-non-workin....

> BTW that problem still exists (last time I checked was 18.04).

Another example of blaming the platform instead of the app vendor. I also suffer from this problem with Dropbox. It's entirely Dropbox's fault for being lazy, ripping out working code, and refusing to fix it despite users begging for years. Dropbox hasn't been a user-focused (at least, non-enterprise-user-focused) company for a long time now. I hope a good alternative becomes available soon.

> Also Apple and Microsoft don't throw away a whole desktop environment's code every 5 or 6 years. I remember the Gnome 2 -> 3 mess. I also remember the KDE 3 to 4 mess and I just use XFCE when forced to use a Linux machine now as they don't seem to lose their collective minds every few years.

I agree with you completely here. The KDE 3-to-4 transition was awful. GNOME is even worse. This is known as the CADT problem. This is why I advocate for software stewardship, doing what's best for the community and the users rather than reinventing the wheel over and over. The TDE project (forked from KDE 3.5) is very interesting and inspiring here.

> I sure he could if given the time. However the vast majority of people wanna get on with their life and not have to relearn where to find things in a UI. I have problems using Visual Studio on someone else machine running the same version of Visual Studio because I have the 2005 key bindings enabled, I can struggle along using the newer keybindings, but I am using the interface at about 30-40% of the speed I can normally use it at.

Of course, I don't like pointless churn either. But here again you're conflating problems: a new version of Visual Studio, made by the same company, and different desktop environments made by completely different groups. I don't think it's reasonable for you to expect KDE or GNOME or whoever to exactly reproduce Windows or any other UI. Even Microsoft isn't being consistent from one version to the next. So, again, you seem to be holding Linux (the wider Linux-based software world) to a different standard than proprietary software. That's not fair.

> Comments like this demonstrates how out of touch Linux users are with the regular computer user. It reminds me of the time when Richard Stallman said on a mailing list he emailed web pages to himself using some cron job or something equally as ridiculous, then on the FSF page he writes a long lecture about the evils JavaScript Minification when he doesn't even use a web browser.

RMS is quite eccentric, yes. I disagree with him on a lot of things. At the same time, I respect and appreciate what he has done for the FOSS world. I suspect that, without him, we wouldn't have as much "Free Software" as we do now.

I'm not so out-of-touch as you think. I'm well aware of how things work in the Windows-using world, and how non-techie users use computers and what they expect.

My point is that you can't have everything. You can't expect projects like GNOME or KDE to be like Windows just to satisfy potential former Windows users. No one's paying them (generally) to do so. And you seem to be holding FOSS projects to a certain standard, but allowing companies like Microsoft to violate it, just because they have more users. That's not reasonable.

> "There are more murders over there so the murders over here don't matter".

But don't you see: that's just what you're doing from the other direction. You complain about problem X on Linux, but ignore the same problem on Windows. You're being unreasonable.

> I've been using Linux now for 15 years. I've given up with it. They could fix every complaint I have tomorrow and I won't give a damn, I am done with it.

Since you seem very emotional about it, I guess it's not surprising that you're being unreasonable about it.

BTW, saw some of your comments about capitalism and Marxism. They were good. Keep speaking the truth (serious, not sarcastic).

That's perfect if you have multiple inputs. If you don't, a simple KVM switch would do the trick too. Unfortunately they're a little pricy for HDMI due to low supply/demand.

I have a soundcard primarily for offloading as much audio processing from the CPU as I can. Music playback of high-bitrate files is far from perfect even when you're using a soundcard, with frequent crackling, but using WASAPI mode all but completely clears up crackling when I play music.

It's also worth noting that if your passed-through GPU is decent enough, you can just use the HDMI as an audio source.

I also have a USB audio interface for my mic and instruments, directly connected to a passed-through USB controller instead of using the soundcard inputs, which helps reduce the noise floor.

Having a dedicated USB controller is very important for reducing latency. A lot of computers nowadays come with at least two, but if you have one then you'll need to get a cheap but reliable USB PCI card. And you have to be careful selecting which chipset because not all of them support Function-Level Reset which means you can only pass through once before needing to restart your computer, and not all of them correctly implement Message Signaled Interrupts which means you could have problems passing through certain configurations of PCI devices.

From here, my next plan is to purchase one of these[0] which may mean I don't even need a soundcard for output at all. It might be the best solution for virtualization right now in terms of latency and offloading processing from your CPU.

However the soundcard might still be necessary if this DAC doesn't support processing at different bit-rates on the fly. Currently my setup allows for me to play songs with different bitrates at their natural bitrate when using WASAPI, preventing the need for downsampling or upsampling. Reaaaaally noticeable with things like raw video game MIDI formats where different bitrates sound completely different.

Your processor should be fine, my 6700k and 16GB of RAM are plenty. Though if we weren't still in a NAND shortage I would upgrade to 32GB.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LP3AMC2/ref=ox_sc_saved...

Although alpha.telemetry.microsoft.com doesn't currently exist either, others do, e.g. us.vortex-win.data.microsoft.com resolves to a Microsoft-owned IP address.

It's a mistake in the report.