Hi everyone,

I’m getting fed up windows and want to switch my laptop to linux. My laptop also doesn’t meet windows 11 standards so I figured nows a good time to switch. I don’t do a whole lot on my laptop, but there are some programs that I do need to use. I have an E drum kit and right now I use reaper and Steven slate audio center to play and record my drums through my laptop. I looked at reaper, and I see linux options for download. But for Steven slate , I only see windows and Mac. This is pretty disappointing and so I figured I ask to see what would work for me.

I was going to go with Ubuntu, because it seems to be the most user friendly and has good support. I also use mullvad VPN on my laptop very frequently, which was another reason I chose Ubuntu.

Any help is appreciated. I’m willing to look at other distros too if there is one that better fits my needs.

EDIT: I have successfully migrated to linux mint and have reaper working with yabridge. Thanks, everyone, for your help and suggestions!

  • Refurbished Refurbisher
    2•7 months ago

    SteamOS is unique in that it’s an immutable OS (which means basically everything out of the /home folder is not modifiable by the user). This limits you to package management that works within the /home folder, which is basically just flatpak and AppImages by default. You can also use things like nix, but that’s a bit more complex.

    Modifying the SteamOS system still is possible with utilities like rwfus, but that’s a bit more complex (OverlayFS is the keyword to look up if you’re curious).

    With normal, mutable distros, you are able to modify the entire root of the filesystem, which means there are no restrictions on how you can modify your OS, and you can use regular package managers that do so for you.

    Also FYI, flatpaks work on every distro, so anything that’s available on the SteamOS Discover store will also be available on every other distro. It uses flathub.org

    • @WeebLifeOP
      2•7 months ago

      Oh wow, I didn’t realize steam os was that different compared to other distros. Last night I was trying to install wine on ubuntu, and it wasn’t listed in the app store. I thought this was weird, cuz it’s in the discover store. So I had to manually install it. Not sure if it’s because I’m still using the “try ubuntu” instead of the full installation. But that helps knowing that all flatpaks work with every distro.