Bitwig is outstanding. I so wish there was an open source DAW that came close in stability and workflow. Zrythm crashes constantly, and the workflow in Ardour is obtuse. I can't quite figure out how to do anything in LMMS and the other options just look so dated I'm not even tempted to try them.
Agreed. I've been designing professionally since 2009, and have switched my workflow to 100% FLOSS tools. Scribus, Inkscape, and Krita are suitable for professional work these days.
This. There really is no perfect solution for VMs; I went from a VM to dual booting to full time Linux with a Windows VM that I never even touch anymore. Ironically, Linux VMs work very smoothly on Linux hosts due to opengl support.
if every word that offended anyone anywhere was banned...
I'm hearing this point a lot, but it just makes clear that people aren't reading or understanding my other remarks. This isn't a random word that someone decided was offensive. This is a slur that is well known to large number of disabled people. They have been telling us this for some time. You haven't heard it used that way? That's great, but that also doesn't mean that it isn't. You know who does know what slurs are used against them? The people who are targeted by them. I'll bet there are plenty of slurs you haven't heard of that are, in fact, still slurs regardless.
Agreed, you get to pick between a system that empowers you to do whatever you like, or an unborkable system. If you need something that won't let you shoot yourself in the foot, you ought to be using an immutable distro.
For ages I blamed GNU/Linux for breaking when I was unknowingly causing issues. These days, I don't fix what isn't broken, and if I can't help myself, I make sure I understand what I'm doing, write down any changes I make, and ensure I have a snapshot ready in case things don't work out.
GNU/Linux may not exclusively be for advanced users anymore, but system customization still is.
Tbh, if you're using mainstream hardware, and a sensible DE like KDE Plasma, it pretty much is plug and play these days. Drivers are built into the kernel; the system detects your hardware at boot and loads the appropriate drivers automatically, so you can even swap out components and simply turn the system on and it'll work in most cases. Peripherals like audio interfaces that are tricky and require diver installs on windows are often plug and play on GNU/Linux, but generally speaking, being a windows expert will not help you.
Windows has layers of abstraction designed to make it difficult for you to understand how the OS is actually working - GNU/Linux does not. You can access any information, change anything you like, and almost all system config down to a low level can be done by editing plain text files. It's intimidating at first, but with some experience, config and troubleshooting is miles easier than windows because no information is hidden from you. Then again, that really is in the realm of advanced usage; for day to day computing you shouldn't have to think about any of this.
If you're worried, try out a live USB of a beginner friendly distro like Manjaro. You can run the os off of a USB stick and get a feel for it.
This is the case for all operating systems. With the Linux kernel, support for a great deal of hardware is included, but not everything makes it into the mainline kernel, which is where specialized distros come in.
Initial setup can be hard, and then, because GNU/Linux lets you do whatever you want, It's not hard to bork the system if you're using commands you don't understand. The biggest realization for me was that if I want a stable system, I can't expect to experiment with it / customize it to the nth degree unless I have a robust rollback / recovery solution like timeshift in place. Feeling very empowered after leaving windows, I have destroyed many systems, but truly, if you set up your system and then leave it alone, these days it's not difficult to have a good experience.
But yea, you're totally right: the userbase can be toxic AF, and there's no one place you can go to learn the basics you really ought to know.
I remember feeling really limited on GNU/Linux; for me, it was the desktop environment. Switching to KDE Plasma gave me back the kind of power and usability I was used to from the GUI.
Besides that, always be sure you're following tutorials for your specific distro, and a recent version at that. In my early days, I borked my system many times by pasting commands I didn't understand meant for other distros or older versions of the distro I was running.
On software, I would recommend trying to find FLOSS replacements wherever possible. People often sell Linux as being able to run most windows software, and while that's true, you'll almost always have a better experience after taking the time to learn a FLOSS tool written for the platform. Even with proprietary native applications, companies often consider GNU/Linux an afterthought and the experience suffers. If you're using KDE Plasma, for example, try finding a KDE app at apps.kde.org.
For a distro billed as beginner friendly, I always had issues with Ubuntu too. The most trouble free distros I've ever used were Manjaro (which I still use to this day on machines I want to just work out of the box - ignore the hate), and Mint. Manjaro comes with an official KDE Plasma verson too.
Bitwig is outstanding. I so wish there was an open source DAW that came close in stability and workflow. Zrythm crashes constantly, and the workflow in Ardour is obtuse. I can't quite figure out how to do anything in LMMS and the other options just look so dated I'm not even tempted to try them.