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!
It souds like this is literally your first step outside of windows.
Don't listen to any of these people, stick to dual boot, especially if your quality of life (I mean your hobbies) are tied to mastery of a known ecosystem of specific softwares.
Linux can work but you will need to compromise, and you will royally fuck up and unless you are embracing troubleshooting as an hobby you won't like it.
Dual booting allows you to have a safe harbor for when things go south.
I've had a dual boot for around 6 years and only this year I have, not deleted windows but set up my boot to default to linux (it used to be last OS booted).
I had to give up the quality of some audio filters for streaming, I coud not for the life of me figure out how to run a couple of specific games, I'm unable to uncompress big .exe archives (yarrr) in certain specific disks and after a year of smooth daily sailing I had my drivers go nuts and had to dive in and fix it, doing research on old shitty reliable windows.
I would very much agree here. I've (admittedly mostly server side) been using linux for around 30 years now. But I'm still dual booting on my desktop. There's just a few things that will still only work in Linux, and also if I break things I can go to windows if I need to do something "right now"
Dual boot gives you the option of, if you have the time trying to make something work in linux. But, if you don't have the time, just boot to windows and do it.
How I do things, is I have drives that are shared between both OS (I use btrfs since there is a windows driver and, so far (around 3 years) I've had no corruption problems. But you can share ntfs too and a boot drive for both. But, it's not a requirement.
Also yes, it is quite easy to break a linux install. It's not really because Linux is bad. It's just because you have so much choice in which drivers to use, which desktop environment (and even the components that make it up) that it's easy to accidentally select some combination that doesn't work and you end up with only a console to fix things from.
I like that the OP is choosing Mint. I've not used Mint, but from all I've seen it looks a real good option for someone starting into Linux from no experience.