It’s been a week. Ubuntu Studio, and every day it’s something. I swear Linux is the OS version of owning a boat, it’s constant maintenance. Am I dumb, or doing something wrong?
After many issues, today I thought I had shit figured out, then played a game for the first time. All good, but the intro had some artifacts. I got curious, I have an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 and thought that was weird. Looked it up, turns out Linux was using lvmpipe. Found a fix. Now it’s using my card, no more clipping, great!. But now my screen flickers. Narrowed it down to Vivaldi browser. Had to uninstall, which sucks and took a long time to figure out. Now I’m on Librewolf which I liked on windows but it’s a cpu hungry bitch on Linux (eating 3.2g of memory as I type this). Every goddamned time I fix something, it breaks something else.
This is just one of many, every day, issues.
I’m tired. I want to love Linux. I really do, but what the hell? Windows just worked.
I’ve resigned myself to “the boat life” but is there a better way? Am I missing something and it doesn’t have to be this hard, or is this what Linux is? If that’s it’s just like this I’m still sticking cause fuck Microsoft but you guys talk like Linux should be everyone’s first choice. I’d never recommend Linux to anyone I know, it doesn’t “just work”.
Good to hear someone say it’s a good distro. I’m totally fine learning as I go, just didn’t realize how different they can be. Kinda thought it was Arch for the pros and everything else was accessible easily. I’m loving learning it, and happy to hear I picked a bit of a harder one to start, it’s how I learn best. I was just frustrated.
Unfortunately the only audio I’ve been able to get to work right for my use case is Alsa, I can’t route anything through my mic interfaces with Pipewire or JACK.
I’m getting the hang of it, but it doesn’t help that my PC is also my media server so that was another layer to figure out. It’s been a journey.
Check out Helvum for routing audio through Pipewire. It’s a patchbay that just lets you drag and drop the wires to connect things. I use Carla, personally, which lets you also add things like compressors and sidechains, but Carla is a lot heavier, so Helvum is a good place to start.
Also, anything that works for JACK should work for Pipewire, because Pipewire implements a JACK compatible audio server.
Technically, ALSA is always running and controlling the hardware directly, but it can only accept one audio stream, so you put an audio server in front of it to allow multiple streams. It used to be just JACK for professional stuff and Pulseaudio for consumer stuff. Then Pipewire came along as the best of both worlds. It uses Wireplumber to manage the session (connect things automatically), and implements a JACK compatible server and a Pulse compatible server so everything can connect to it.