Hey there Linux community. I’ve been interested in Linux lately and have been considering switching to Linux Mint from windows 11. My main pc is a Surface Laptop Studio with an intel i7, 32g ram, 1 terabyte ssd, and an rtx 3050 ti gpu. I’m thinking about trying out dual booting to see how I like it, but I have some questions.
I use my laptop for a lot of creative work, video editing, web design, music production, photography, etc. I’m not too worried about it because I’ve come across many promising FOSS alternatives, but there’s some software I’d like to ask about specifically. I ditched Adobe Premiere in favor of Davinci Resolve a while ago and I know that there’s a native Linux version of Resolve, and I’m just curious about how well that runs for the people that use it?
As far as music production goes I’m an avid user of Ableton Live. It’s been my go to for years and I know that support for it on Linux isn’t the best, if it’s even there at all. I’ve seen a few people claim they’ve gotten it working but it seems a little suspicious to me. So to anyone in the music space, what are the best Linux supported alternatives? Or, in the event I decide to switch, should I maintain my dual boot setup to just stick with Ableton?
I’m also pretty locked into the Microsoft ecosystem with OneDrive (I get a terabyte of cloud storage for free so it’s where almost all of my files are). I’m in the process of trying to setup my own cloud storage with nextcloud or something similar, but until then I’m curious if I’d be able to set up OneDrive live file syncing in my Linux environment, similar to how it works on windows? If anyone has any experience with that I’d love to hear some input.
Not something that’s absolutely necessary, but I’m just curious if the touch support of my laptop would be maintained. Since it’s a surface device it’s actually a really nice touch screen, and the pen input is great, my wife borrows it for digital drawing sometimes and loves it. I don’t use it all the time but I do occasionally and it’d be a huge plus if it still worked just as well.
I think those are pretty much the only things holding me back from fully dedicating myself to switching, so I’d really appreciate some input. Thanks!
Somewhat depends on the version of Linux you have. The ffmpeg build that is included with Ubuntu 24.04 for example is really an incomplete build and as a result there aren't a lot of encoding / decoding options with any software that utilizes it for encoding and decoding, this includes Davinci Resolve and also kdenlive and for vlc playback. There is a fix for this but it is arduous, download ffmpeg from github and compile from scratch. Enable all the libs and codecs except for the MacOS specific ones. Now the fun part, run the configure script, it will break af the first missing lib, install that. Some libs you will also need to download source and compile from github at least with ubuntu because it's not included in the distro. You will need to do this around 300 times because the moron that wrote the ffmpeg configure script, instead of listing ALL the libs missing so you could snatch them and install in one go, bombs out at the first, so you have to go through 300 or so iterations. I've done it, it's painful, but at the end you end up with a much more capable ffmpeg and by extension Davinci Resolve than the pile of crap they provided you with.
Can't you just install ffmpeg from a PPA rather than compile it yourself?
@entropicdrift It is not a complete build, many codecs are not compiled in.
There are PPAs with different builds of ffmpeg for Ubuntu. It also depends what codecs are needed as to whether this is even relevant?
Bearing in mind some (many) encoding codec libraries are not installed by default as most people don't need them but can readily be added from the official repos via apt or synaotic. Each codec is usually provided as a library of its own; ffmpeg is more than just one set of binaries. There is a big difference between an incomplete build and incomplete default install of all available libraries/codecs. Most people don't need or want every possible encoding codec installed by default.
However some codecs are more strictly licensed and may need to be installed or acquired via different routes - that is the nature or proprietary software (as on Windows).
Which codes are you saying are not available in Ubuntu official repos?
Sorry, there are no PPAs that have all codecs compiled in? Is it illegal to distribute or something?
@entropicdrift Not that I am aware of, I searched for some before I went to the effort of chasing down all the libraries and compiling myself and wasn't successful at finding one.