My first foray into Linux was something like twenty years ago, I ran Linux Mint briefly and happily, but I screwed something up trying to get flash videos to have sound and kind of gave up and went back to windows.

Flash forward, I got my desktop and my husband’s laptop set up with Mint now, and I can’t believe how easy it was. Everything has been working excellently, and the laptop is getting more attention than its had in years. The software manager is amazing, I got set up with steam and my daw (reaper) in no time. So far I haven’t run into anything I’ve tried to do that I couldn’t do with minimal elbow grease.

Thanks for being so passionate about Linux gang, I don’t know that I would have converted nearly so quickly if I wasn’t exposed to it here. Y’all are cool as hell.

  • bstix@feddit.dkEnglish
    5·
    2 days ago

    Reaper is great once you get to know it. It does everything you need and more for recording and editing audio and midi (and some video).

    For Linux specifically… It’s identical to the other versions, so you can download it to your current OS and try it out, if that’s what’s keeping you from switching to Linux. You don’t even need to install it.

    Plugins is a different issue for Linux. Some people use Vine or such to use certain VSTis. Personally I’m on a mission to avoid that, so I only use free plugins native to Linux, and honestly, there’s not many. The stock plugins works fine, but they don’t have any fancy GUIs or particularly great default settings.

    A word of caution: Reaper is very customisable. I would recommend reading at least parts of the manual to ensure that you understand how it’s “supposed” to be work before starting on some large project and trying to fit the square block into the round hole. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. I’ve seen lots of support posts where people describe their projects and even the helping replies are needlessly convoluted. If you know your way around a real mixer desk, you’ll find that every combination of sends, auxs and busses are possible in Reaper, so there’s really no need to stack up hundreds of tracks and effects and whatnot to achieve basic stuff. Just like every DAW it’s easy to get lost in the routings, so it makes sense to get a well structured flow from the start. Especially because it’s soo customizable.

    Reaper is very stable, which is nice for live performance. I have only had crashes from dodgy plugins in Windows.

    Unrelated to Reaper, my experience is that Linux works better than Windows when you have many USB midi controllers. Both Puppy and Mint recognized my ancient hardware straight out of the installation, no matter which port I use (unlike Windows).