donuts

When your entire existence relies on exploiting the work of the people who are "under you", of course you want them to work harder, faster and more. They'd crack out the whip if they'd get away with it.

These rotten billionaires don't care about our little lives or how much we enjoy or very short time on this planet, they only care about maximizing share prices and filling their pockets with bonuses that the workers are earning for them.

Uh, yeah... So, basically I use an ubuntu:latest (LTS) distrobox container which has:

1. Its own $HOME, specified using the --home parameter when making a distrobox container.
2. Wine-staging
3. Yabridge
4. Bitwig Studio 5 (the Linux .deb version, installed with dpkg to the default location)
5. A whole bunch of Linux native plugins (like Modartt Pianoteq, installed wherever but then with the .so's symlinked into my ~/.vst dirs).
6. A whole bunch of Windows plugins (like an old version of Kontakt, SampleTank, AudioModelling SWAM, MODO Drum/Bass, etc.), installing in the WINEPREFIXES that live in the distrobox container's $HOME. (I then use yabridge inside the container to bridge them all for Linux.)
7. I think I also have Pipewire installed inside the audio production container, but I can't remember if that's necessary or not.

Finally, I use the distrobox-export command to export Bitwig Studio to my host system, so I can run it as you normally would, just hitting the start key and clicking on the Bitwig icon.

So it's kind of a complicated setup initially, but from day to day it's really easy to use. I just open Bitwig, load up whatever Linux or Windows VST (the Wine ones take a little longer to initialize that I'd like but it's not too bad), and just make music. :)

https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_tips.md#container-save-and-restore

I think I followed this. I think you have to do it through podman/docker (whichever your distrobox is using).

It almost just worked, but again I had to fix a couple of Wine symlinks to get all of my Windows VSTs working again... (I also had to reregister some VSTs in certain cases.)

Another unrelated but useful thing to look into wrt distrobox is distrobox-assemble, especially if you have a few different distrobox containers dedicated to different tasks. I could go on and on about this stuff, lmao.

I've heard good things about Studio1, but I haven't tried it myself.

Oh yeah, and speaking of Distrobox...

I also happen to have all of my audio production software (DAWs, Plugins, Wine, Yabridge, etc.) living in an Ubuntu-based distrobox container, which has the added benefit of allowing me to ~~export~~ save the entire container and drop it mostly painlessly* onto a different machine. It's really cool to be able to pick up my entire music making environment and bring it with me, but it might be a bit overboard for some people. I don't have much of a choice other than to use distrobox since I run Fedora Silverblue as my daily driver. lol

*It doesn't work flawlessly, because I sometimes have to fix some important Wine symlinks that break when doing this.

Yeah! Don't sleep on it! I can say without reservation that yabridge is essential for me. :)

The basic yabrigde workflow is:

1. Install wine-staging and yabridge on your distro of choice.
2. Use wine to install all of your Windows VSTs somewhere. (I prefer to use a separate WINEPREFIX for each plugin maker, but that's probably not fully necessary). If you don't know much about Wine this can be a bit hard to wrap your mind around, but that's another story.
3. Then you run yabridgectl add where all of your various Windows VST dll files are (instead of whatever Wine prefix you installed them in).
4. And then when you run yabridgectl sync yabridge will create a .so bridge library for each of your Windows VSTs and spit them out into ~/.vst3 or whatever.
5. Finally you point your DAW of choice to ~/.vst3 or whatever, and your WIndows VSTs should hopefully show up and work just like they do on Windows (with the usual caveat of Wine being pretty great but not always perfect).

Sadly there's no good GUI frontend for it (that I know of at least), but as far as CLI tools it's pretty easy to learn and use. Also, you may want to make sure that you've got realtime privilages setup on your system, and you can find guides to doing that in the yabridge wiki.

But yeah, I've got a bunch of Windows VSTs from Native Instruments and IK Multimedia and a bunch of others too, and they are work very well when bridged these days, so I'm able to use Linux for music without sacrificing anything.

I do gaming and music production on Linux without much issue at all these days.

Most games are pretty easy to work with these days thanks to Steam, Lutris, and Bottles.

As for audio, there are 4 key ingredients to my setup: Pipewire, Bitwig Studio, Wine and Yabridge.

Pipewire is pretty easy to use and works in a low latency setting just fine, so imo you no longer have to juggle PulseAudio + JACK.

Bitwig isn't open source, but it's fantastic and inspiring and supports Linux natively. They've also been great about stuff like the new open source CLAP plugin format.

I've found that Wine (staging) does a pretty reasonable job handling any Windows VST I've thrown at it, but it's a bit of work getting it setup, especially if you're new to the concept.

And finally yabridge is a great CLI tool for turning all of your Windows plugin .dlls into Linux .so, that you can easily use in your DAW of choice.

So if you want to do music production on Linux then definitely check out Bitwig and Reaper (along with Ardour, like you mentioned). And personally, I think that if you have a decent chunk of Windows VSTs it's worth investing a bit of time learning how to getting them working in Wine and then bridged with yabridge.

I don’t consider my gaming in terms of price/time because that just encourages buying games that suck away my time.

So true and well said.

I love playing a 70 hour From Software game or a 50 hour JRPG as much as the next guy. But some of my favorite games of all time are old classics like Super Mario World or Zelda: OoT, which can probably be completed in a single session or two if you know what you're doing. And there have been some truly great, but short, indie games over the years.

Then there are also sim games and arcade/fighting games that had great reliability and you can get many hours out of if you like them.

In the end, as long as the game is fun and satisfying, I don't care how long it lasts.

siding with Israel

Siding with Israel over... Hamas?

Personally I don't find that to be very controversial at all, as Hamas aren't exactly angels. You'd have to have the memory of a goldfish to forget that Hamas just led a mass terrorist attack (if you consider Hamas a legitimate military force, which I do not, then please substitute "terrorist attack" with "war crimes campaign") against Israeli civilians including old women and young children.

To state what should be obvious to everyone, you don't have to be pro-Hamas to feel empathy for innocent Palestinians. I feel that Biden's actions and rhetoric have been reasonable and measured on this extremely complex and highly volatile conflict.

I'm gonna continue my run of not giving Elon Musk a fucking cent.

I've never run a server, so I can't really say much about how sustainable it is to do it right now, but ultimately I don't see why it should be able less sustainable than running any other popular website.

Granted, I think you're totally right that there's a generally unsustainable attitude that's pervasive on the fediverse and the open source community in general, which amounts to a sentiment that "someone else will pay for all this". It's wrong, it's naive, it's unhelpful, and it's basically an express lane towards the tragedy of the commons. I've worked for non-profits and I've seen first hand how difficult it can be to turn users into supporters, but the sad truth is that non-profits are just like businesses in the sense that if costs are higher than revenue they will not survive very long, and this is true for community run fediverse services too.

I do think that people who like the fediverse should want it to become financially sustainable, at the very least.

I'm open to the idea of limited, non-invasive ads for example. (Plus I think that if the fediverse ever becomes massively popular we're going to see thinly veiled ads anyway, in the form of "influencers" and "sponsored content". That's inevitable, and honestly probably even worse that straight-forward ads.) I would not leave my Kbin.social or my current Mastodon instance if there were a small number of ads.

Also I could be wrong on this but IIRC, Misskey supports user data storage quotas that can be expanded for a price. And I think that's potentially a smart and sustainable method of getting those people who make heavy use of their server to chip in a little bit. If someone wants to post a lot of images, audio and video to their Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, Lemmy, etc., instance then I think it's reasonable to expect them to cover some small fraction of the hosting cost by becoming a paying member or paying for a server-level storage plan.

I hate remote work because it means I have to pay attention to overall output and the progress of the project instead of constantly surveilling and lording my authority over the workers, who I view as subhuman tools for my own enrichment.

Does that about sum it up?